Recently I have found a wonderful Firefox extension called Ubiquity. In its literal definition, ubiquity is a state of omnipresence, which is something that Ubiquity tries to accomplish by being a Swiss army knife of sorts. From the get-go, it's above average because it's actually written by Mozilla themselves, so they know the ins and outs of Firefox.

But what is it and why do I like it? Well, did you ever wish you could tell your computer "do this" or "do that" in natural (English) language? Well, Ubiquity is an experiment by Mozilla to accomplish just that. By teaching your browser "verbs", it knows how to respond to commands you give it.

So, say you were on this really confusing site, and you wanted to look up "infinite recursion". You highlight it with your mouse, hit Ctrl+space, and type in "google this".

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From here you can either press Enter for actually googling it, or just do Ctrl+Alt+1 to go to the first link, Ctrl+Alt+2 for the second, etc. I can also translate it into Russian:

Or I can select an entire paragraph, and with the same command I can translate it right in the page by hitting Enter.

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Here's some other useful commands:

• "wolfram plot(y=1/x)": Plot that equation in Wolfram Alpha.
• "weather": Gives me the local weather.
• "tweet hey look I am using Ubiquity!": Post "hey look I am using Ubiquity" as your newest tweet on twitter.
• "edit page": gives you a cursor inside the page so you can edit the text in it. Use "stop editing page" to stop it.
• "facebook filip sufitchi": looks up the most interesting person on Facebook.
• "char trademark": shows you the ™ unicode symbol
• "tinyurl this": makes a TinyURL for a selected URL. "tinyurl http://google.com" makes a tinyurl for that site.

Along with many other goodies. Most of these exist because, like Firefox, Ubiquity can have plug-ins. By learning "verbs", which are fairly easy to program (or so I gather), what it can do grows. There already is a large base of verbs ready to learn.

And, like other Firefox extensions, there are of course questionably useful but ʇı əsn oʇ sʎɐʍ unɟ ʎɹəʌ. (Text inverted using Ubiquity's "invert" command)