An experiment into connecting the Web with language.
It Doesn’t Have to be This Way
You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.
This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.
It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.
Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time.
Enter Ubiquity
Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.
The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best 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.
Learn more about Ubiquity and the capabilities that it could provide for users and developers.
The Initial Prototype
As part of this announcement, we’re also releasing an early experimental prototype to demonstrate some of the concepts of Ubiquity and the possibilities that it opens up. This release is meant as a illustration of a concept and mainly focuses on the platform. The next release will explore interfaces that are closer to features that might make it into Firefox.
Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
Mozilla Labs is a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit. The Ubiquity experiment is still in its infancy and just getting started. There are many ways to join the team and get involved:
We’ve also started compiling a suggestion list for possible Ubiquity commands. If you have any suggestions, add them here or get inspired and develop one of them and add them to the command repository.
The user experience for opening up a new tab in Firefox is somewhat lacking: you are greeted by an intimidating, blank canvas with no hint of what to do. Could Firefox be doing something better with it? The answer is almost certainly yes, but the question is what?
Initial Ideas & Mockups
To get the ball rolling, we are highlighting two early concepts.
The first is Aza Raskin’s Contextual New-Tab Actions, which is a look at using the power of context and contextual actions to enhance the browsing experience through a smarter new tab. Its main goals are to:
Simplify the common actions, like being on a page and needing to perform a look-up on some text. Right now you have to copy the text, open a new tab, go to a new web service, and paste it in. If the browser knows you’ve just selected an address and then opened a tab, it knows you’ll probably want to map it. Let’s give the user one-click access to mapping it.
Streamline your habits. If you always visit TechCrunch after reading Slashdot, the browser can offer you one-click navigation from a new tab.
Super-charge search. You often go to a new tab to start a search action: Make that front and center.
The ideas are meant to be mix-and-match, not necessarily all used together.
The second is Atul Varma’s Ambient News, an experiment into how Firefox could learn from your habits to give you the news you care about in the new tab area. Its goal are to:
Provide the user with zero-configuration news about the sites that they visit frequently.
Explore how to bring the benefits of RSS to a wider audience.
Get Involved
So what do you think about these ideas? They are not meant as static artifacts, but as a launchpad for thinking about better ways to use the new-tab workflow. There are two ways in which you can participate in the design process:
It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s meetup will be Thursday, August 28th, 6pm at the Twitter office - 539 Bryant St. Suite 402, San Francisco.
There will be progress updates on the various active Labs projects as well as plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. And of course, pizza :)
If you are in the Bay Area we’d love to see you! Please take a moment to RSVP by commenting on this blog.
Extend Firefox 3 has wrapped up and we’re very excited to announce the winners! We received well over 100 entries, representing hundreds of hours of hard work from people around the world.
Many of these extensions are in their early stages of experimental development, however we have seen some powerful new tools and prototypes that we are excited to share. It was hard to determine the winners, but at last, here they are.
GUI prototyping and diagramming that everyone can use.
The Pencil Project’s unique mission is to extend Firefox 3 to an opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use. Pencil makes uses of the SVG support in Firefox 3 to implement all the shape rendering and scripting.
HandyTag simply providing a complete set of most relevant keywords in the bookmark’s edition panel. These keywords are retrieved from many different sources.
Runners up (6)
Webchunks by Daniel Glazman - Firefox implementation of the Internet Explorer Webslices feature, plus more!
Read It Later allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest. Features include offline reading, sync between computers, and RSS feed creation.
Firefox 3 lets you tag your bookmarks, but it doesn’t give you a great way to browse your bookmarks by their tags. TagSifter tries to. Select a group of tags in the sidebar or menu, and TagSifter shows you all the related tags and bookmarks.
Adds an album view and thumbnail view to the bookmarks manager
Along with an album view (like cover flow) and a thumbnail view (with drag and drop), this extension also adds previews to the tooltips in the bookmarks sidebar. Just hover over a bookmark in the sidebar to see the previews.
Best Music Add-on
Grand Prize Winner (1)
Fire.fm by Jorge Villalobos and Jose Enrique Bolaños
Direct access to the extensive music library on Last.fm
Listen to music related to your favorite artist, and discover new artists and music in the process. Listen to your friends’ favorite music. Find Last.fm users with musical taste similar to your own. Quickly access your favorite stations by just typing a few letters into the location bar.
We truly appreciate the efforts of all the participants and their support of the Mozilla Community! Thanks again for such a great contest!
Conversing (a.k.a. messaging) is a common online activity, and a number of desktop and web applications enable it. But with an increasing variety of protocols and providers, it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of all your conversations.
Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions?
Snowl is an experiment to answer that question. It’s a prototype Firefox extension that integrates messaging into the browser based on a few key ideas:
It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.
Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones.
A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later.
Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages.
The Initial Prototype
The initial prototype supports two sources of messages: RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. And it exposes two interfaces for reading them. First, a traditional three-pane “list” view, targeted to active reading of important messages:
Our next step is to gather feedback on the prototype and the ideas behind it. We want to know if the concept has promise and is worth pursuing further. We’re particularly interested in feedback on how messaging might fit into the browsing experience and if there are other interfaces (or refinements to the two interfaces built into the prototype) that would make it easier for users to have online conversations.
We’re still considering what may come after that, but possible extensions to the Snowl prototype include:
support for additional message sources, e.g. Facebook, AIM, Google Talk, etc.;
an interface for writing and sending messages to enable true two-way conversations;
an API to make it easier for developers to build new experimental interfaces, e.g. an instant message view.
Also, last week at the Firefox+ summit there were related discussions about the future of Thunderbird’s user experience, with many ideas that overlap the ideas embedded in Snowl. We expect that some of the Thunderbird ideas will influence Snowl’s future, and that lessons (and possibly code) from Snowl will influence Thunderbird’s future.
Warning: the initial prototype is a primitive implementation with many bugs, and subsequent versions will include changes that break functionality and delete all your messages, making you start over from scratch.
Laboratories are places where science and creativity meet to develop, research and explore new ideas. Mozilla Labs embraces this great tradition as a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit.
Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.
You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.
We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.
Concepts may take the form of Ideas, Mockups or Prototypes.
Ideas
It all begins with an idea. A sentence, paragraph, or even bullet-points kick-start the process. Ideas can be simple and non-technical. It should be easy for anyone and everyone to help shape the future of the Web. So throw your notions, inspirations, dreams and visions out to the community.
Mockups
Turn your idea (or someone else’s) into an image, sketch or video. Words are great, but you know what they say about pictures. Mockups offer up a visual and communicate ideas in terms that are just a bit more polished and real. They draw the next person in, tempting them to pick up the concept and run with it.
Prototypes
A prototype is interactive. Feel, touch and play with developing concepts. Prototypes get ideas across by showing off the moving parts. They aren’t always fully functional or pretty, but they’re more than a static image or two. They’re a dress rehearsal of sorts, with minimal programming. Make a prototype in HTML, Flash, or whatever puts things into action.
We only ask that all concepts and related source materials be freely redistributable and remixable under either a Creative Commons license (for Ideas and Mockups) or the Mozilla Public License (for Prototypes) so that we can all effectively collaborate on the exploration. Again, the intent is not for these concepts to evolve directly into new products but rather to provoke thought, facilitate discussion and provide inspiration.
Be bold. Be radical. The crazier, the better. Let’s explore the future together.
Soon we’ll have a more structured way to contribute concepts. For now, all you have to do is use your favorite method of sharing an concept with the world. If it’s an idea, blog about it. If it’s a mockup, put it on Flickr. If it’s a prototype, host it on your web site. Tag it with “mozconcept” and then let us know about it by posting to the Concept Series discussion forum.
