Replace Your Firefox Plugins with Mozilla Ubiquity

Everybody loves Firefox. Even with all the other fast, standards-compliant modern browsers out there (like Chrome, Safari, and Opera– sorry IE!) Firefox stands alone for its rich variety of extensions. If you’re using Firefox, you can be sure that “there’s an extension for that”. It’s tempting to fill up one’s browser with every tool that could make your web experience easier, faster, cooler, and more productive. The trade-off is that each extension you use makes Firefox a little more sluggish.

I’ve already discussed how to speed up your Firefox by using different browsers for different tasks, but I’m falling in love with a new tool that is quickly making many of my beloved extensions obsolete. Mozilla Ubiquity, the natural language command line in a browser, promises to streamline your productivity much like the legendary Quicksilver does for Mac.  Think of it as “One Extension to Rule them All”. Here’s how:

First, a quick overview of Ubiquity by Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Replace your Search Bar

Ubiquity has allowed me to take the search bar completely out of my Firefox toolbar. Where I used to have a whole long list of search bars to flip through for every possible search I do often…

…I have been able to add all of these search engines to my Ubiquity so I can just invoke them with a keyword. I just start typing in Chordie.com‘s name, and my search plugin pops up.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!
I can add any search engine to my Ubiquity’s list of commands simply by clicking in the site’s search bar and invoking Ubiquity. It instantly gives me the option of creating a search command for that site. I give the command a name and I’m done!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Not only has this allowed me to get rid of my search bar (and all my search plugins) completely, but it also makes my Firefox extension “Add to Search Bar” (which basically does that task I just described) completely redundant.

Replace Social Sharing Extensions with Ubiquity + Bookmarklets

Social media and social bookmarking have made it easy to share whatever we are reading with our groups of followers. If you’re like me, you send different types of links to different communities. At one point, I had an Firefox extension for Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Then I discovered bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are just like your browser’s bookmarks, except they contain bits of javascript that perform snazzy functions. You can submit pages, shorten links, tweet, download YouTube videos, and a whole lot more.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Ubiquity allows you to make any of these bookmarklets into a command. Just add the bookmarklet to your toolbar, then invoke Ubiquity. It’ll quickly offer you the choice to “Create Bookmarklet Command”, at which point you just give the command a name and you’ve got it!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

How does Ubiquity help you streamline your workflow? Discuss in the comments!

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