Mozilla’s Ubiquity and IE8 – Hold on a second!

Tuesday, August 26 2008

The talk of the “town” tonight is Mozilla’s neat new Firefox add-on called Ubiquity. This add-on is designed to “connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily” – according to Mozilla. Robert Scoble posted about Ubiquity tonight – saying that this (Ubiquity) is the reason why he won’t be using IE8.

Wait a second – hold up!

If you’ve taken a look at IE8 Beta 1 you would have noticed that it has a feature very similar to this new Firefox add-on called “Activities”. You can read about Activities from a developer’s stand point here on the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit. IE Program Manager Jane Kim also discusses Activities as well as Web Slices (another important IE8 feature) here in this blog post too. Essentially developers can write Activities for IE8 that can do a variety of things from mapping a address on a webpage to looking up definitions on Encarta, to even doing min searches on the web. The fact of the matter is that these Activities in IE8 allow users to “do common Web tasks more quickly and easily” as Mozilla says about their Ubiquity. Granted, these Activities aren’t anything special in regards to “new user interfaces” but certainly do their job in giving me what I need to perform web tasks quicker and easier than before. To use Activities, users can right click on pieces of information on websites to access the Activities. In Mozilla’s Ubiquity you have to hit ctrl + space (on Windows) to activate a screen where you can type “commands” to get quick information you want. But simply right-clicking and choosing a Activity in IE8 works pretty good too. Like Scoble says of Ubiquity – “It’s sort of like search. But more powerful.” I imagine more complex and interesting Activities will be designed by developers for IE8 as IE8 hits Beta 2. I’m certainly excited. And this is certainly a feature folks should take notice of.

Scoble says Microsoft doesn’t care about “passionates” anymore and cares more about the people who read USA Today. Bullshit. IE8’s Activities are proof Microsoft cares about the “passionates” – people passionate about the Internet according to Scoble’s definition. And I believe IE8’s Activities has much more potential to take those “non-passionate” and make them passionate about using the web.

So yes – Microsoft has indeed put something like Ubiquity into IE8 and it’s been there for months (since MIX08) with Beta 1.

I am totally prepared for folks to come here and tell me I am wrong and that IE8’s Activity feature is nothing like Mozilla’s Ubiquity. That’s fine. If you’re going to tell me I’m wrong don’t give me that “Microsoft doesn’t care” garbage. I think having Activities in IE8 alone is proof Microsoft knows those who are passionate about the Internet need a better way to do web tasks easier and quicker than what is available today. IE8’s Activities may not be some full-on uber-browser-mashup utility like Ubiquity is suppose to be but there seems to be functionality that is shared amongst the two which I think is worth calling out.

UPDATE 8/27: Activities have been renamed to Accelerators with the release of IE8 Beta 2.

Tags: mozilla, firefox, ubiquity, microsoft, internet, web-browsing, ie8, internet-explorer, internet-explorer-8, web-slices, activities