Ubiquity: Web Browsing Evolved
Mozilla Labs just released a new Firefox super-plugin called Ubiquity. Their description is pretty on-point:
"With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do."
If you have a Mac and are familiar with Quicksilver, it’s a similar concept applied to the web. In essence, Ubiquity gives you a pop-up command line of sorts, and it tries to figure out things to do with the inputs you give it.
For example, you type in wiki peanut butter and it gives you the Wikipedia page for peanut butter. Or select an unknown word on a page and type define this and it gives you a quick dictionary lookup of the word. It comes with a pretty impressive list of built-in commands: Google Maps, Gmail, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Yelp, IMDB, and more.
What’s even cooler is the code that makes these commands run is really pretty minimal. You can do a lot with just a little bit of JavaScript. It comes with jQuery tacked on so all the fancy effects and Ajax goodness are available without hassle.
Admittedly, this is obviously geared more towards "power users" and it’s still very alpha, but I think this has huge potential to take the web to a whole new level. The ease of development of commands will make this thing hugely powerful in a very short time. Check out their introduction video for some more in depth information.