In the days after Firefox 3 was released, I thought something like this:

“Well, that’s about it. They’ve solved all the memory hogging issues, tweaked tabbed browsing to as good as it’s going to get, and added a few little touches like a decent bookmark manager. Sure, the awesome bar is awesome, but there really isn’t anything Mozilla could add to this that would improve browsing without getting in the way. I guess the future for Firefox will be keeping up with the latest standards, and maybe restyling the interface every now and then.”

Turns out I was dead wrong. Ubiquity, although only in a barest of bare-bones alpha release, proves that there is still a vast untapped space of cooler and shinier – not to mention faster and more powerful – ways of interacting with the internet.

Ubiquity is a text command tool not dissimilar from quick launching utilities like Quicksilver or Gnome-do, but with a vastly greater power and integration into the web. Quick launching tools tend to act as intermediaries: they take your command, figure out where you want to go and send you there. Ubiquity is more butler than messenger. You can highlight a section of text and tell Ubiquity to translate it into French, then tell it to email that same section of text to a friend. You can look up a term in Wikipedia and do a word count on the article. Admittedly, these examples are not all that impressive or novel, and the current selection of commands is quite small. However, Ubiquity includes a simple authoring tool and language which lets you create and share custom commands to do pretty much anything. Cool.

After I installed Ubiquity for a test run, the first thing it asked me to do is map a keyboard shortcut to call it into focus. I chose ctrl + spacebar and happily started testing. I spent a few minutes looking through the list of commands (accessible by telling Ubiquity “command-list”), playing around with them and trying to see how many I could use in the course of some normal browsing. I quickly realised two things: firstly, ctrl + spacebar is a very awkward shortcut, and secondly, the need for having a shortcut at all was not entirely clear. If you type a string of text while browsing, most of the time it will just float off into the ether. It’s rare that you would have a text box or some other kind of input selected. Moreover, a lot of Ubiquity commands act upon text you have grabbed with the mouse, which automatically means any text input into the keyboard will go nowhere fast. So why can’t Ubiquity accept text input without calling the command line first? Interacting with Ubiquity doesn’t have the same feel as interacting with, say, the Linux command line, where there is no distinction between the command entry space and the output space. Ubiquity feels more like a utility that you have to call upon than a direct interaction with the browser.

The main flaw with Ubiquity is the same one that has confounded many of the previously mentioned quick launching tools, as well as pretty much any other piece of software that attempts to turn your unbounded input into useful action. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unique about Ubiquity in the way it handles natural language commands, which make the eventual universal access dreamed of by its developers seem a little disconnected from the actual software. Without a well-implemented parser or a clear idea of how to subtly force users to make their input machine readable, the ability for Ubiquity to act upon natural language commands will be strictly limited by the foresight and contingency of the commands’ designs. When I first installed Ubiquity, I selected some text and told it to “translate into french”. It took the highlighted text and replaced it with the words “into french”. I tried “translate english into french” and got a similar result. When I read the dropdown menu the third time I typed “translate”, I saw it telling me to enter (text to translate), (to language) and (from language). Typing “translate this english to french” finally got me what I was after, but by this point the original text had long since been “translated” out of existence. Hardly intuitive.

All this having been said, Ubiquity is still a brilliant idea and a groundbreaking piece of software. If Mozilla makes this the centrepiece of Firefox 4 (or whatever it is going to be called), it will probably be their most significant contribution so far to the average user’s experience, not to mention a “into french” against Internet Explorer. Ahem, that’s a “coup de grâce”. They’re not quite there yet.