Last Tuesday, Mozilla Labs introduced a “language-based… user-generated mashups” command line plugin for Firefox called Ubiquity, and I’ve spent the past few days putting it through its paces. Unlike the Aurora browser concept developed with Adaptive Path that we saw earlier this year, Ubiquity chooses linguistic over visual gestures to enable shortcuts to common functionality. I’m a fan of the approach (especially when it includes spoken language), but I’m keenly interested in seeing how Ubiquity will adapt beyond the most basic tasks.

Ubiquity is the latest spiritual inheritor of the command line. Like Aza’s Enso, or MIT’s Inky, they see the description of action (or, the use of verbs) as the simplest path to accomplish a task. It’s the difference between graphically juggling icons as metaphors for physical actions, and simply describing the steps involved in a task. It ultimately comes down to what tasks one is trying to accomplish, of course; Ubiquity won’t help me when I’m working in Photoshop. But for what it’s designed to do–data trafficking, the manual API–Ubiquity’s linguistic UI might be the ticket.

The initial suite of commands and APIs that Ubiquity comes equipped to handle seem to favor search (of various stripes, including translation); the passing of links (via email, I think I saw Twitter in there), mapping and a couple of other web services are thrown in as an overture toward eventual… ubiquity. I initially wanted to see more, but respecting that this is a very early release, I think at this point all Mozilla and Aza Raskin are trying to do is prove a point.

I don’t see Ubiquity’s brand of gestural interface as having a great deal of value on the desktop, where the user is treated to a banquet of interface methods. Even having the capacity to get more done without having to reach for the mouse doesn’t preclude the adaptability of a multi-window modern GUI. I know developers who swear by Quicksilver and similar launchers, but a developer’s relationship with their desktop is more symbiotic than the average user’s; developers are like bobsledders trying to shave hundredths of seconds off their time. But then, this isn’t about the desktop so much as it’s about the web.

And this is where Ubiquity (or, more importantly, gestural linguistic interfaces) will really shine. Especially on the future of the web: limited desktops and mobile devices. Where the switch between text-input and cursor-input is more problematic, the ability to quickly tap out some functionality between applications that don’t themselves have interoperable APIs.

Right now, though, it’s a bit of a gimmick. I’m willing to kick around with Ubiquity for a while, continue putting it through its paces, but I still say we won’t appreciate it until we’re using it on iPhone 3.0.

Introducing Ubiquity

Had a small OMG moment when I saw this. Scott McCloud–that fantastic author of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Making Comics, and the dear-to-my-heart Zot! series–has created an introductory comic for Google’s Chrome browser. While I’m somewhat concerned that Google felt they needed to explain their browser in a comic, I can’t think of a better storyteller to tackle this subject and give an audience a better grasp of why Google feels now is the right time for a new browser. Cheers, Scott.

Google on Google Chrome