ft.com/techblog

Those nice people at Mozilla, the folk who brought you the Firefox browser, have introduced an empowering instant mash-up feature that anyone should be able to master.

Their Ubiquity application also makes the kind of command-line interfaces that went out with MS-DOS actually seem easy to use in their drop-down implementation.

An explanatory video on the Mozilla Labs blog gives a number of demonstrations of how Ubiquity can be ubiquitous within the browser.

One example: write an email inviting someone to lunch, highlight the address, call up Ubiquity with a keyboard stroke, type a Map command and click ‘Insert’ to add the map that appears into the email. Type Yelp and a review of the restaurant can also be inserted. Type Add and the event is added to your calendar.

Aza Raskin, Ubiquity’s creator, says the service is still a prototype but enabling these user-generated mash-ups amounts to a big win already.

Some of Ubiquity’s uses are also possible through other browser plug-ins such as Vysr’s RoamAbout, but the application is another example of how Firefox is staying one step ahead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the browser wars by extending the possibilities of user input.

Time was the only typing needed in the browser was to write www addresses. With the latest Firefox release, the “awesome bar” now replaces the Google search box, history and bookmarks features in some respects as typing in a keyword brings up a drop-down list of previously visited sites from which to choose.

Microsoft is making progress on other fronts. It has introduced new privacy options in IE8 Beta 2, released today.

InPrivate Browsing, Blocking and Subscriptions makes it easier to control whether IE stores browsing history and cookies and allows users to block sites that monitor their browsing. The feature has already been given an affectionate “porn mode” label by bloggers.

August 27th, 2008 in Internet | Permalink