Firefox’s unique tool for interacting with web services has gotten easier to use thanks to a new update.

Ubiquity 0.5, a project from Mozilla Labs, is a major improvement to one of the browser’s most useful add-ons. It now uses a more natural language engine that’s closer to human speech, and there’s a helpful tutorial for new users. The update also includes support for more languages and more context-sensitive commands.

It’s officially a preview release for Firefox 3 and 3.5. It has a few bugs, but those eager to test it out can grab it now.

The Ubiquity add-on for Firefox is a “command line interface for the web”. It enables you to interact with web services like Google search, Twitter, Yelp, Delicious and Gmail, as well as perform searches on content sites like Amazon, Wikipedia and Flickr. Ubiquity enables you to perform specific tasks, like e-mail a link to a Gmail contact, post a tweet or check the weather, all with just a few keystrokes.

When Ubiquity was first released last year, we hailed it as a huge step forward for the web’s power users. It’s even slicker now, but it still has a problem.

It’s a command line — In order to get the most out of Ubiquity, you have to be the type of person who’s comfortable typing text-based commands into a text-based interface. Obviously, it’s not for everyone.

But the Ubiquity team is closing the gap. Taking a cue from such natural-language tools like Wolfram Alpha and Google’s iPhone app that lets you search the web using your voice, Ubiquity now boasts a new engine that’s able to guess what you want to do even if you don’t give it a specific command or verb.

Previously, you’d have to initiate a task by typing a command like “map” or “translate.” With the new update, you can simply plug an address or a French phrase into Ubiquity, and it’s now smart enough to discern what you want with a surprising level of accuracy.

Better yet, you can just highlight an address on a page and summon Ubiquity. The window will automatically guess you want a map and fetch it for you.

Same with that French phrase. Highlight it and Ubiquity will assume, since you’re using a localized English version of Firefox, you’re looking for an English translation.

Hit Enter and the actual French phrase on the web page is replaced by the English version.

Of course, if it fails to guess properly, you can correct Ubiquity by adding specific parameters to your query, and it will do better next time. It also learns your habits. If you’re a frequent Twitterer, Ubiquity will eventually assume that any raw text you type into it is intended for Twitter, and it will place that choice at the top of the list of suggested services.

As cool as these natural language improvements are, Ubiquity is still a rather esoteric add-on. Thankfully, the download comes with a very friendly tutorial that walks new users through a few common tasks. It really shortens the learning curve by showing you how to use the new command structure.

The tutorial also shows off the power of context-sensitive searches.

I typed “Pink Floyd images” into Ubiquity. My first options were Google image search and a Flickr image search, each with its own set of thumbnails on display within Ubiquity’s little window.

Next, I summoned Ubiquity with a keystroke and typed “cappuccino”. My suggested choices: Twitter the word “cappuccino,” search Yelp for “cappuccino” nearby, search Google for “cappuccino” and translate “cappuccino” into English.

Twitter popped up because that’s one of the things I use Ubiquity for most frequently — it’s learned that. Yelp popped up because Ubiquity gathered that this is a food item I might be looking for, so it’s assuming I want to find said item nearby. Google and Google Translate are probably the most logical third and fourth guesses in this circumstance (It means “cappuccino,” by the way).

View this functionality with an eye to the near future when the geolocation services are fully integrated into the browser, and you can sense how much more powerful this will get. You won’t need to enter any location information. Just type “pizza” or “bookstore” or “weather” and you’ll get what you want — a map, a list or the current temperature — without having to add “94107″ or “San Francisco” to your query.

This Ubiquity update isn’t perfect. It’s a preview release and still rather buggy. There’s a helpful “Reset to factory defaults” button on the help page, which I used a couple of times after Ubiquity kept getting stuck thinking I’d want to post everything to Delicious. Eventually, I removed Delicious from the Ubiquity’s list of available services. It also hung a few times, beach balling Firefox and forcing a browser restart.

But the improvements here point towards a whole new standard for easily interacting with web services in the browser, and we’d recommend it as an essential addition to your power user toolbox.

Will it catch on? Are web users ready for seemingly anachronistic text-based interfaces, no matter how useful? We hope so, because Ubiquity proves how powerful they can be.

See Also:

• Make the Web Do Your Bidding With Firefox’s New Ubiquity UI
• Ubiquity Add-on for Firefox Gets an Update, New Interface
• Geode Tells Firefox Where You Are, What’s Nearby

Songbird on Mac OS X. Click the image for a larger view.

The latest release of the Songbird open-source music player, version 1.2, is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The update to one of our favorite music management apps brings several nice new features, including two-way syncing with iTunes and yet another speed bump that puts Songbird on par with Apple’s music player in terms of performance.

We’ve called Songbird the “Firefox of music players” in the past — not only is the jukebox app built on the open-source Mozilla platform, but like Firefox, Songbird continues to improve with every release. Songbird is one part iTunes and one part web browser, making it incredibly easy to browse, find and add free music from your favorite sites to your local library. In short, it’s almost everything we always wanted iTunes to be and quite a bit more.

About that “almost.” There is one big, glaring drawback — Songbird still can’t sync music to an iPhone or the iPod Touch. Building in support for the iPhone and iPod Touch natively in Songbird is high on the developers’ to-do list, but while you’re waiting for that to happen, a new feature in Songbird 1.2 should help ease the pain of those devoted to their Apple handhelds.

The latest Songbird lets you automatically export the tracks and playlists you’ve added to Songbird back into iTunes. The two-way syncing with iTunes means you can manage and listen to your music through Songbird and then simply jump over to iTunes when you need to sync something to your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s an elegant workaround for the lack of native device support. Of course, Linux users, for whom iTunes isn’t available anyway, are still out of luck.

Among the other new features in this release is the ability to automatically organize your music files and store them in multiple folders. The app looks at your MP3 metadata, which it then uses to organize the files across folders. The whole process is automated, making it remarkably easy to clean up and organize messy libraries or collections spread out over multiple locations.

Songbird 1.2 also adds quite a few new features to the Last.fm plugin. Last.fm fans can now listen to artist, tag, and user stations by sending the station links from Last.fm directly to Songbird. There’s added support for Last.fm’s Radio Directory so you can browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm within Songbird. The new Radio Directory support also includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and the libraries of your friends and neighbors (Last.fm-speak for others on the social network with similar musical tastes).As with every Songbird release since 1.0, this one is quite a bit faster, especially when it comes to complex tasks like importing your iTunes library. It still took a little while to get all of our music and playlists imported, but it was no more than five minutes for a library weighing in at over 200 gigabytes, which isn’t too bad (and something you only need to do once).

If you’d like to take Songbird for a spin, head over to official site and grab the latest version. It’s available for all major platforms, and since it’s open-source, it’s a free download.

See Also:

• Songbird 1.0 Poised to Rule the Jukebox Roost
• Songbird Inches Toward Becoming The Firefox Of The Jukebox
• Songbird Music Player Makes Impressive Performance Gains

As we mentioned last week, Mozilla has rolled out the release candidate of Firefox 3.5. While the initial release went only to beta testers, Firefox 3.5 RC1 was released to the general public on Friday.

With a release candidate in the wild, the final release of Firefox 3.5 inches closer Mozilla’s goal is get Firefox 3.5 out before the end of June.

If Mozilla succeeds, Firefox 3.5 will arrive almost exactly a year after 3.0. That’s a long wait in “internet time,” but Firefox 3.5 brings a host of new features — more than were originally planned — and is significantly faster.

We recently saw a demo of the native HTML 5 video features, which support videos encoded with the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs, allowing video to play in the browser without Flash or any other third party plug-ins.

But it’s the speed improvements that really make Firefox 3.5 worth the upgrade. Faster page rendering times and an improved JavaScript engine mean your day-to-day browsing experience is noticeably faster. And the updated user interface, better crash protection and new privacy controls, bring Mozilla’s browser up to speed with more current releases like Apple’s Safari 4 and Google’s Chrome.

If you haven’t already, head over to the download page and take Firefox 3.5 RC1 for a spin.

See Also:

• Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate Now Available
• Firefox 3.5 ‘Preview’ Paves the Way for Final Release
• Firefox 3.5 Nears Completion, Beta 4 Now Available
• Third Firefox 3.1 Beta Ready for Testing
• Firefox 3.1 Will Add More Awesomeness to the ‘Awesome Bar&’