Ubiquity Prototype for FX & IE8b2
by ShahUbiquity does improve the browser experience. I’m in awe! Why? Because, command linguistics will be revived amongst the normals!!!!
Some snaps (click to enlarge) of Ubiquity in action:
Quoting Don Norman.
Command line interfaces. Once that was all we had. Then they disappeared, replaced by what we thought was a great advance: GUIs. GUIs were – and still are – valuable, but they fail to scale to the demands of today’s systems. So now command line interfaces are back again, hiding under the name of search. Now you see them, now you don’t. Now you see them again. And they will get better and better with time: mark my words, that is my prediction for the future of interfaces.
Turns out that the power of command line interfaces for GUIs has not been lost on developers and enterprising startup companies. Several people have written with pointers to sites that offer interesting command line systems that can be added to existing Operating Systems.
Thank you Aza and the guys @ Mozilla Labs people for bringing back the CLI, killing the search bar sort of(FINALLY!!! Thank you. *bow*,) and providing a reason for which I’m ditching IE8, Opera and Safari as my personal browser.
I’ve to disagree with Robert Scobleizer who stated:
It’s not for non-passionate Internet users. They won’t get it. It takes some time to learn how to use this feature.
Sorry but you don’t have to use the CLI. The learning curve is not steep at all.
Users can simply right click on words within the window and select the various Ubiquity options. In time, they’ll get used to the CLI.
The Ubiquity CLI is more than just a concept to be applied onto various platforms. Ubiquity if ported to FX Mobile makes it a more appealing platform to come.
Say you need to port a CRM client to the mobile platform. You’ll probably have a web service running and develop a client for a particular mobile platform. The GUI of the client must be good for the user to actually use the system. A small screen with 50 icons or so, and difficulty of navigation kinda suck! Hence, the CLI is better. Command Linguistics FTW!
Ubiquity is in its early days and it’s very promising already!
Next, IE8b2 for a certain OS named Microsoft Windows.
Dear IE team, you wound me. The very first thing I’ve noticed is the lack of a close button on the very first tab. I’m a user who oftens wants to close the 1st tab without having to close IE entirely. Why do I have to open up a new tab in order to close the prev. one? Come on!
Accelerators are good though. They are kinda ‘ubiquitous’ in the sense that they are common actions done by the user.
InPrivate Browsing is a plus. It helps people accessing clients at say a library or a public place, to not have cookies and history saved. It also avoids having to go to Options, and clicking on several buttons to get rid of “evidence.” 
Show Clipboard is a feature which is too limited. Free Clip (though it won’t integrate IE) comes to the rescue.
Suggested Sites is a also cool feature.
Rendering Issues are foiled by Compatibility View.
Enabled this feature helps in better rendering of pages. (BTW, IE8 seems to render pages way faster than IE7..no, I’m not high. It’s fast, alright.) Check out the following snapshots of Myspace.
I disabled the SmartScreen Filter. I don’t like to be nagged.
Kudos to the IE team! F12 launches the Developer Tools windows. Finally! It’s about time. For me, it’s a big plus. I used to open up pages in Opera just to have the ease of W3C validation at a single click.
Speaking of Opera, check out the following snapshot. Aside from the lack of CLI, it has had “accelerators” (the opera-way. I dunno if it has a name. It’s a feature.) since long.
For the web developer, the 4 major browsers need to be used - from FX to IE to Opera and Safari/Konqueror. Am I the only one seeing a rise in web sites which will require FX because of the CLI? Of course, there will always be “non-lazy” developers who will develop their own CLI using actionscripting for example.
I’ve reviewed some of the features which matters to me, not all of them.
Anyway, I await the final releases of IE8 and Ubiquity (this one may take longer to attain the final milestones, but the concept rocks.) Thank you Aza Raskin, Blair McBride, Abimanyu Raja, Jono DiCarlo, Atul Varma and Mozilla Labs, as well as everyone who has been contributing to Ubiquity.
It feels good, doesn’t it? - we are all feeling that our web browsing experience has been (if you’re testing those 2 products)/will be improved.
