Ubiquity

I suppose you all have read about the newest Mozilla Labs baby called Ubiquity which is a mix of a command line and service launcher for Firefox. It was released as a prototype yesterday and there have been some positive reviews about the new service so far.

Let me go into detail on what Ubiquity is all about. Ubiquity installs itself as an extension just like any other. It is activated by the keyboard CTRL Space command which displays a transparent black rectangle in the upper left corner of the screen below the Firefox header area.

That screen resembles a command line waiting for user input. There are about 50 commands that Ubiquity comes installed with which are the core of the extension. This reaches from posting messages (about a website) to Twitter, looking up information on Wikipedia, performing web searches on various search engines or looking up information on Google Maps.

The real benefit for the user is that he does not have to leave the current tab to get the information because everything happens in that black box. Results are shown in that block as well in real time.

Mozilla put up a user tutorial at the Mozilla Wiki site which explains the basics using a few examples

The goal of the developers however is far reaching, they did not want to produce a web command line utility, they want to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions.
  (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
• Extend the browser functionality easily.

Those are some strong interesting goals which could change the way users interact with websites and services forever.

Have you tried Ubiquity yet? What is your opinion of the extension?

Restore The Default Firefox Search Engine

I recently installed a software that changed the default search engine in Firefox. Firefox would query that search engine whenever I entered a keyword or phrase in the location bar. Thankfully though it is pretty easy to revert the change and restore the default Firefox search engine.

You need to open up about:config in the location bar and filter for the term keyword:url. A right-click on that entry and the selection of Reset changes the search engine to the default search engine.

It is of course possible to use another search engine by modifying the entry and entering the url of the new search engine that should be used.

Disable Adblock Plus for Bookmarks

Adblock Plus is one of Firefox add-ons that you will find on every recommendation list. The add-on blocks many forms of advertisement including popup and banner ads. It sometimes however blocks regular websites from being displayed correctly and I found it very useful to add my bookmarked websites to a filter that would allow ads to be displayed on them.

This has another effect. Websites that I visit regularly deserve the money that they make from advertisement. This does not mean that I click on a lot of ads but think of those banner ads that pay when someone visits a website. So, it’s good for those sites and helps them stay alive.

It’s pretty cumbersome to add all websites manually to Adblock Plus this is why the author created a script that processes a list of websites and makes them filter ready so to speak. A whitelist will be generated which can be imported into the Firefox add-on.

To do that you need to export the bookmarks in Firefox 3. Firefox 2 users can simply copy and paste the contents of their bookmarks.html file that is located in the Firefox profile folder into the form which will process the contents.

Firefox 3 users have to export the bookmarks as HTML before they can do the same. (Because Firefox 3 is storing bookmarks in a different way). Use the keyboard combination CTRL SHIFT B to open the bookmarks manager. Click the Import and Backup menu at the top and select Export HTML from the menu. After that open the file, copy all contents and paste it into the script.

All that needs to be done is to save the whitelist as a text file and import it into Adblock Plus to whitelist all bookmarked websites.