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?

The keyboard is mightier than the mouse

I usually work with the keyboard in Firefox whenever possible which speeds up many processes in Firefox. I was always a bit irritated that I had to click on a search result after searching on a search engine. This did not feel right and natural.

After typing the search phrase and hitting enter it would be natural to be able to select the first, or any other, search result from the list without having to move the hand away from the keyboard to grab the mouse and click the link.

Several Firefox users must have felt the same way because multiple Firefox add-ons have been created that deal with that matter. One that has not been updated in 18 months is the Search Keys extension which adds visible keys to the search results.

The first result would be labeled 1, the second 2 and so on. Pressing the corresponding key on the keyboard loads the search result in the same tab. Pressing ALT (CTRL in Linux) and the number will open the search result in a new tab while SHIFT and the number will open it in a new Firefox window.

The keys comma and period are used to navigate search results pages. This is not working in all search engines though. A quick test revealed that all keys are still working when searching Google while the comma and period shortcuts are not working in Yahoo.

Firefox Repagination add-on

Don’t you hate it when you visit websites that divide articles to increase their pageviews and look more appealing to advertisers this way ? While some websites provided a print link that displays the full article others do not have this luxury and if you want to read the full article you have to click next a dozen times.

Not very user friendly if you ask me. enter Repagination for Firefox. This little Firefox add-on adds an option to the Firefox right-click menu when hovering over specially named links. It only becomes active on links that are either numbered (1,2,3,4) or named Next.

The option Repagination becomes visible on those links. If you select it you can load all other parts of the article below the current part. That is extremely useful for paged articles. You can limit the amount of pages that should be loaded below the current one, it ranges from 5 to unlimited.

Repagination comes with a slideshow option that is great for photo galleries. You can select a delay of 1 to 64 seconds until the next photo of the gallery is displayed.

The add-on does not work with any website that is dividing their articles though. Some websites prefer to name the next links and do not use next or a numbered approach. Those paged articles do not work that well.

A great addition to this add-on would be the option to use an automatic approach for some websites that you visit regularly.

Install Firefox add-ons locally

The usual way to install a new Firefox add-on is by left-clicking on the link on a website which will start the installation. You might be asked to allow the website to install add-ons in Firefox but that’s usually it. I have lately experienced some troubles with several installations of Firefox add-ons. I did receive download errors for instance or installations that would simply stop at a point.

My thoughts on this topic were that it would probably be easier to install the add-ons locally, meaning to download the xpi file of the add-on and install it from my local hard drive which would actually be the same process that Mozilla Thunderbird users perform when installation add-ons for the email client.

My only problem was that I did not know if this was possible at all. I did check the add-ons menu first but there was no option to load a xpi file from the hard drive.

I then tried to use the File > Open File menu and what can I say: It works! I was able to install the add-on from my hard drive using the Open File dialog.

You can download the xpi files by right-clicking them and selecting Save As from the menu.

Visualize the Firefox History

I have to admit that I’m not using the Firefox history function at all and clear it – and other data – whenever I exit Firefox. Call me a little bit paranoid but I prefer it that way. Some of my friends however love their history, they use it to access websites with a few clicks instead of using the keyboard. Each to his own I’d say.

I think we can all agree that the Firefox history in the way it is displayed in the sidebar is not the optimal way of displaying information. Only the page titles are displayed and as we all know webmasters are a lazy bunch, they create websites using copy paste and some tend to use the same title for all of their pages which makes it quite difficulty to identify the correct one.

ThumbStrips visualizes the Firefox History. After installing the extension it adds a toolbar at the bottom of your Firefox screen that displays screenshots and titles of the latest websites that the user has visited. Thumbnails can be sorted as well by dragging and dropping them around. A click on a thumbnail loads the website immediately.

Add RSS to Netvibes directly

I have been using Netvibes, an online RSS Feed service, for a long time and did not switch to Google Reader like so many of my friends and colleagues. The one thing that I did not like that much was that the process of adding new RSS Feeds was cumbersome. I had to copy the feeds url, open the Netvibes website, click on Add Content, click on Add a feed and paste the url of the feed in there.

To many clicks and moves if you consider that desktop RSS readers or several other feed readers add feeds that are clicked automatically. The Firefox add-on Add2Netvibes steps in and makes it possible to add feeds to your Netvibes account directly from the page that you are visiting.

It adds a green plus icon to your toolbar. If that is not done automatically you will have to right-click free space on a toolbar, select customize from the menu and drag and drop the green icon to one of your toolbars.

Firefox Configuration Mania

Firefox Configuration Mania is a Firefox add-on that displays many configuration options in a menu that looks similar to the default Firefox configuration menu. The functionality however is different and can best be described as advanced. When you open the Configuration Mania menu you see five tabs at the top, those are: Browser, Security, HTTP Network, UI and Debug. Each of these tabs opens a huge list of options that sometimes expand as well which means that it could take a while to take a look at each option.

The browser menu for instance leads to options for High Speed Browsing, Tab Browsing and Location Bar while the Security menu deals with Javascript, Redirections and Cookies. You might remember the Javascript add-on Better Javascript Control that I wrote about a few days ago. Most of the options are also available in Configuration Mania.

Many settings require some research on the Internet unless you really Internet and Network stuff in and out. The add-on explains several settings but some are not explained at all which means that beginners will have a hard time at least at the beginning.

Optimize Adblock Filter List

The filter list of Adblock plus contains the websites that you do not want to block ads on. This can be due to several reasons. You might be a webmaster who wants to make sure that ads are running correctly on his system and also find out which ads are running on it or you might have troubles viewing a rich media site if you do not add the site to the filter list.

Whatever the reasons may be, the filter list can be problematic especially if you take duplicate entries into consideration. The Adblock Filter List Optimizer changes that by optimizing the filter list by removing duplicates and reducing the number of lines and words contained in the filter list.

Just head over to the Adblock Website, export your filter list in Firefox and paste it into the form there. Click on optimize and you should see the results just a second later. Import the filter list again after saving it in a text file and overwrite the old one in the process.

Better Javascript Control

Firefox without add-ons allows to enable or disable Javascript. If you uninstall the popular Noscript you can enable Javascript on trusted websites and disable it on all other websites. If you want a better Javascript control in Firefox you could take a look at the Firefox add-on Controle de Scripts which gives you a much deeper control of what Javascript may do and may not do.

The Firefox add-on has basically two tabs that control certain Javascript functions. The main tab is called Permissions and you can allow or disallow functions like resizing windows, changing images, hiding scrollbars or the bookmarks toolbar here. The second tab is Popups which defines which Javascript events are allowed to open popups.

Knowledge of Javascript events is needed to configure this properly, you could use Google to search for the Javascript events as well . You might be saying that you don’t want any popups but you might consider that some websites open new pages in a popup after submitting a form or clicking on a link.

Unplug for Firefox

Unplug is a Firefox add-on that is very similar to the Download Helper extension that I have been writing about before on this website. It scans a website for video, audio and other multimedia content and provides direct download links to those files. Many users that I know use Unplug to download flash games from websites to be able to play them offline.

The process is as simple as it can be. Download and install the extension and restart Firefox afterwards. Now right-click the top toolbar in a free space and select customize from the menu. You have to locate the Unplug icon and drag and drop it into the toolbar. If you do not want to do this you can access Unplug from the Tools menu as well.

Unplug opens a new page listing all media files. Sometimes more than one file is listed on that page but it is normally quite easy to find the real one. Once that is done just click on save to save the file locally. This can be used on many games sites and I suspect also on video and audio websites.