Ubiquity is a Firefox plugin currently in alpha stage. It’s been receiving some attention so I figured I’d try it out.

Short description:

Meh.

Long description:

I can do just about everything Ubiquity can do using built-in Firefox features already.

For example, using their tutorial as an example:

Let’s start with Wikipedia. Say you want to know what a "babel fish" is. You simply issue "wikipedia babel fish".

I can do the exact same thing utilizing keyword searches in FF (which has been in the browser since version 2). In fact I’ve written before on how to do this.

"Wikipedia babel fish" is quite a lot to type. You can save some wear and tear on your fingers by letting Ubiquity’s suggestion list do the work for you. As you saw in the last section, bringing up Ubiquity and typing only "w" presents you with suggestions of all the commands that start with that letter: namely, Wikipedia and Weather.

Again, I can do the exact same thing with built-in FF keyword searches.

Select the words "Mountain View, California" below by dragging your mouse across them:

Mountain View, California

Now summon Ubiquity. With the input box empty (hit the "delete" key to clear out your last command, if necessary), you’ll see a suggestion list full of different commands that could act upon your selection..

I can do a Google search by dragging over text, highlighting, right-clicking and the Google search is right there. I don’t need to "summon" anything. And if it’s not in Google, I don’t care about it.

Let’s say you’re reading a web page and you find an unfamiliar word:

aglet

Just select the word and issue "define".

You could have achieved the same thing by typing "define aglet"

Once again, this can be done via built-in FF keyword search easily by assigning a dictionary search to keyword d. Highlight, copy, type "d [word here]" and it looks it up and defines it.

- OR -

CTRL+K (goes to search bar at top right), type define:[word here], press Enter. Goes to Google and defines word. Done.

The e-mailing feature

This is the best feature of Ubiquity, but only if you use Gmail. And I don’t use Gmail.

The map command

Once again, easily do-able by assigning a keyword search via Google Maps. OR Microsoft Live Maps. OR any other map service with a search function.

All the other commands

The vast majority of this stuff can be replicated using FF keyword searches. eBay searches, Ask.com searches, etc. etc. Any site that has a search function can be assigned any keyword you want in Firefox. Furthermore they’re unlimited unlike Ubiquity.

So what’s so great about this plugin..? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

I uninstalled it.

Like I said, meh.