Although browsers clearly have become better, faster and stronger (I doubt they’ve become “harder” as well), it sometimes seems as if no revolutions have taken place apart from the introduction of XMLHttpRequest by Microsoft back in 2000. But this morning I saw something that really blew my mind and the live mashup of that great Daft Punk song perfectly describes the mood I’m in since.
The reason for all this excitement is a prototype of new functionality in Firefox that redefines how you can interact with websites and -applications, allowing you to use the web more efficiently. Just watch this video to see what I’m raving about (skip the first 50 seconds to see the actual goods);
Ubiquity, as the 0.1 Firefox add-on is called, is the work of a group of smart people at Mozilla Labs, headed by Aza Raskin. Aza is the guy behind Humanized, the company that developed Enso, a merger of a GUI and a CLI leveraging the power of language in a graphical user interface. Aza and a number of his co-workers joined Mozilla at the beginning of 2008 and they’ve already produced some innovative ideas over the last few months.
Ubiquity is past that initial idea-stage, with a prototype that really builds on the great idea’s Aza and his Humanized co-workers had with regards to the power of language in a UI. I’ll bet you this will be the way to disclose and use microformats in Firefox as well (breaking the deadlock the microformat-guys were in). Even though it’s still in alpha/ prototype phase, this is the Future guys and it works! Now try it out, will ya!!