Faster Browsing in Firefox

Ubiquity and Interclue are Firefox add-ons or plug-ins that make Firefox easier to use and improve Firefox performance. Ubiquity adds a rapidly-accessible command-line-like window that you can call up with a combination key-press and then enter your query terms. Interclue provides a handy "look ahead" function that activates when you hover the mouse over a link in a page. It makes Firefox faster by popping up a quick preview of what you'll find if you click the link and go to the other page.

Both are sort of power-user utilities. We'll start with Ubiquity since it has the slightly longer learning curve.

Start by going (in Firefox, of course) to the Ubiquity add-on page and click "Add to Firefox." After installation, by default, it hooks to Ctrl-Space, but this can be changed by going to about:ubiquity (which won't exist until you install it, of course) and selecting the entry field under "Invoke Ubiquity by pressing:"

A great strength of Ubiquity is supposedly that it allows you to create your own mash-ups. Although the interface is text-based, it attempts to use natural speech ideas rather than obviously arcane commands. It's also in alpha condition and is pretty buggy - not all the described features worked for me.

The most egregious of these was probably the one I wanted to like the most. It was "send this [highlighted section] to Rebecca." Ubiquity was supposed to search my Google contacts (one has to be using Gmail for it to work presently), find the contact, and open an email to Rebecca with the section highlighted included in the body. This failed spectacularly for me. So did "send hello to Rebecca." (Hover your mouse over the image to read the caption or click the image for further detail.)

This problem is known to them and open in their bug-tracking system, so it's reasonable that they will be able to figure it out and fix it, but if a main feature, being able to create our own personal mash-ups, isn't working, are enough other features working well enough to justify trying Ubiquity out?

It depends on how you typically work with your browser. For example, if you need to know the weather in Cleveland, would you go to the Weather Channel website, wait for it to load a page, change the location to Cleveland, and load the page again? In Ubiquity, you would press Ctrl-Space and type in "we cleveland" or "weather cleveland."

That's undeniably handy. Another handy command is "google" or "go." Here we've searched for an article that I know is on Bright Hub.

In the Windows and Linux versions, you can go to the URL by pressing Alt and entering the number of the listing, or you can click the desired result with your mouse. Other useful commands are "define" to get dictionary definitions, "map" to find a specific address or city in Google maps, and there are many more. Entering "command-list" will bring up the latest list of available commands.

An interesting feature is "translate." One can highlight a portion of text, open Ubiquity, and type in "translate this to french" or "tra this to french" to have the French translation set directly into the highlighted portion. This works very well and very quickly.

"tweet" or "twitter" plus text sends your text to Twitter. "lookup," "wiki," or "wikipedia" searches Wikipedia for the terms you specify, as does "msn" for searching MSN. "yahoo-search" and "youtube" work similarly. "movie" or "imdb" searches the Internet Movie Database website.

Overall, Ubiquity is useful now although it is far from a finished product. It's likely that a Ubiquity-like feature is going to be included in a future version of Firefox, so if you'd like to get a feel for it now, there's no reason not to try it - as long as you are aware of the limitations of this alpha version.