Firefox’s Ubiquity Add-on Gets Smarter, Goes International
Mozilla has released a major upgrade for its Ubiquity plugin, a tool that offers a command line-style interface for on-the-fly web mashups.
Ubiquity 0.5 is the final release of Ubiquity 0.5, which we reviewed in detail back when the preview version first landed. It’s a project from Mozilla Labs, a fact that speaks to why we find it one of Firefox’s most useful add-ons.
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.The latest version is a major improvement. It offers a more natural language engine that’s closer to human speech, and corrects some oversights in how Ubiquity parses non-English commands. It also contains s new language parsing engine which doesn’t require you to put hyphens in long commands and can make educated guesses about what you want to do. For example, type “taco” and Ubiquity will automatically suggest a Yelp search for the nearest taco stand.
If you already installed the preview release, you won’t notice any dramatic changes in the final version, though Mozilla has squashed a few bugs. We noted in our test drive a few weeks ago that it was quite buggy, so we recommend upgrading.
For the time being, upgrading will be a manual process. Because this update changes some of Ubiquity’s underlying code, this release breaks many third-party Ubiquity tools. As a result, Mozilla is not, at least for now, pushing the new version through the automatic update feature.
Instead, if you’d like to upgrade you’ll have to head over to the Mozilla Labs Ubiquity page and install the update yourself. If you want to take advantage of the new features be sure open up the Ubiquity preferences and make sure the “Use Parser 2″ option is checked.
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