Madhava Enros and I spent 45 minutes the other day thinking about where add-ons live in a web browser that has nothing but content showing 90% of the time.

Suggestions for add-on placement in Fennec.

Thoughts, comments, and mockups welcome! The decisions made now effect the space in which the diverse life-blood of the browser-enhancement community lives. So speak up :)

In Firefox 3.1 it has become possible to do even more amazing things with CSS. Anything can be rotated, skewed, and translated with just a single line of CSS code. With Ubiquity we can use that power for good, evil, and other. This tutorial demonstrates how, with five-ish lines of code, you can create functionality — both commands and extensions — that are “other”. Perhaps tending a little bit towards evil. Watch the video to find out what unpractical joke we’ve got cooking.

Watch the tutorial in HD here.

What most folks don’t yet know about Ubiquity is that it can be used for a lot more than just writing user-initiated commands. For example, any function that starts with pageLoad_ will automatically be run at the appropriate time.

For example, here’s the Ubiquity code for making the browser a little bit better for all of you bats out there:


function pageLoad_flip(){
  var doc = CmdUtils.getDocument();
  jQuery(doc.body).css("-moz-transform", "rotate(180deg)");
}


In an attempt to give us a better place to link to for Ubiquity, we’ve put up a shiny new home for Ubiquity based on a mix of the Labs and Mozilla site designs. It has the basic web-site doodads: a big link to the download, links to the tutorials (now in multiple languages!), and a brief video introduction. It also has an experimental kind of Planet-style news aggregator.

It uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate the feeds, and PostRank to figure out which are the most influential posts. It’s an attempt to help reduce the information overload that the raw amount of information flowing through Planets yield. Try it here.

We are also interested in other ways of playing with opening up the Planet — making it more read-write by allowing a wider community to shape, comment, and pick-out the pulse of the project.

Both Chris Beard, and Atul Varma have talked about using a WordPress-based aggregation plugin to make a scalable Planet. Something akin to FeedWordPress. As a side point, it’s by the very same Charles Johnson who made the Humanized History plugin for Word Press.

We’re interested in your thoughts. What should a good Planet do?