LostInTechnology

Use Ubiquity to Do More with Firefox

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Chinmoy.Kanjilal in Browsers

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Are you really satisfied with the Firefox address bar? What it simply does is take you to a destination. Can it answer any of your queries? Can it understand basic spoken commands? Well, the answer might be no, but only till now.

This detailed guide will walk you and talk you through installing, using and enjoying Ubiquity. You are in for a revamped web experience. To start with, you need to install the Ubiquity addon for firefox or you can skip this and read on.

Getting Started

Ubiquity lets us do many things, but you will get the hang of it once you get how it works. To start, you bring up the Ubiquity panel by pressing ctrl+space. There is a text box where we type in commands. Off page results are shown on the panel itself, and on page results are shown in the browser. Off page results include word count, mathematical calculations and language translation. On page results are managing tabs, refreshing pages, zoom in/out etc.

Actions in Ubiquity

Here, I have covered the most basic commands which can do wonders to your browsing experience.

Twitter

This command lets you tweet directly from Ubiquity. With this command, you can send tweets up to the standard length of 140 characters.  It also displays the number of characters remaining on the tweet. You need to sign in only on sending the first tweet.

Tinyurl

This tool lets us create a Tinyurl from a given URL. Tinyurl is one of the most popular URL shortener. On entering the URL, it also gives live suggestions for the shortened URLs which already exist for the entered URL.

Rotate Image/ Desaturate image

With these commands, we can easily edit our view of the image, rotate it to a custom angle by simply dragging an arrow around a circle, rotating the image relative to it. We also have options for rotating complete web pages in a tab.

Zoom

Zoom lets us quickly zoom a page to a custom zoom level. The zoom factor is expressed in a percentage, the current zoom being 100%.

Fullscreen

This command is used to toggle the full screen mode. Another notable thing here is that, as you type the command, a small suggestion for the possible command appears below the text-box.  Similar functions are available for refreshing the page, printing the page, navigate back, forward and search on Google Yahoo, IMDB, Wikipedia and Youtube.

Translate

With translate command, you can translate text phrases, words and complete sentences into any language of your choice, and from any language of your choice. It comes really handy in a live chat with someone from another country, speaking another language.

To translate, type tr in the command box.  The syntax is tr {text} from {language} to {language}, or the syntax is tr {text} to {language} from {language}.

Other Features

Ubiquity has something for webmasters too. You can select a text and find its length, word count and a lot more with other ubiquity commands developed by third party developers. It also provides us with the options of sending emails from the command box. This is only an overview of Ubiquity can do for us. The rest is what we can do with Ubiquity. For this,  Ubiquity lets us create our own custom commands too.

The next thing you would probably look for is the download link. To remind you, it is provided at the beginning of the post. Ubiquity is one of the best things that happened to Firefox. With it’s innumerable possibilities and capabilities, it is a must have Firefox extension.

(By) Chinmoy Kanjilal is a technology, web2.0 and Linux enthusiast and evangelist. He has an in depth knowledge of working of Softwares, Operating Systems, Hardwares and Computer Networks. Blogging is his favourite pasttime. He blogs primarily at Techarraz. You can find him on Twitter @chinmoykanjilal.

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Tags: calculate in firefox, check page text, fast convert, fast translate, firefox extension, rotate image on page, ubiquity