Mozilla Labs is Ubiquitous
The Humanized folk who now work in Mozilla Labs have taken their Enso work and created Ubiquity, a Firefox plugin that implements the Graphical Keyboard User Interface:
Web applications, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it’s difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is alleviated to some extent by creations like Firefox Add-ons that add toolbars or sidebars to Firefox’s UI, Bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey, but while all of these solutions are powerful, each comes with its own set of problems. The buttons and bars of many Firefox add-ons don’t scale well because of the valuable screen real-estate they consume; Bookmarklets are restricted in scope because they only have the access privileges of the website they’re running on; and Greasemonkey doesn’t prescribe any kind of interaction model, which makes it difficult to reuse the functionality of a script in a context other than the ones it was expressly designed for.
Ubiquity attempts to alleviate all of these problems by allowing end-users to apply textual commands, or verbs, to whatever they’re looking at. For instance, let’s assume that I’ve found a typo on a friend’s blog, and I want to let him know about it.
