I can see the pain and limitations on all the designs.
But sometimes a risky and obvious path has to be taken, when facing a road blockage.
I think design 1 with an added really bright red x button would work more then well, as long as it doesn’t brake the other workings of the awesomebar.
That said I come to my point.
If technically possible, I think an official open release of Ubiquity to the general public, that integrates into the awesomebar. Not as functionality built into firefox, but as a recommended addon would be the next step to take in ubiquity’s life.

That way, you don’t generally force it to everyone and you would get feedback on it from people, that aren’t as technically inclined, as we early adopters are.

If that feature gets as much attention, as I think it will, then the time will come to think about integrating it.
Something in the field of Firefox 5 could be a goal.

Thoughts?

Wouldn’t the Search Bar make more sense?

It already has much of Ubiquity’s working functionality; it’s a Verb Bar to Awesome Bar’s (Proper) Noun Bar. Maybe you could play with giving the Search Bar a little more width and seeing how it looks.

Also, thinking about it: isn’t Ubiquity essentially a new, unified interface for Firefox extensions? Why have developers rewrite code to duplicate functionality that the browser already can do? For example, there are already extensions to map what you’re doing in a page, or look for flights, or send highlighted text to Twitter, etc.

Maybe the goal of Ubiquity is to unify action-oriented Firefox extensions and give them a unified location and simplified interface. Just another way of looking at the concept.

I think the concept of merging Ubiquity in with the Awesome Bar is a good idea. I find myself on occasion using CTL+L to jump to the Awesome Bar out of habit when I intend on bringing up Ubiquity so that would be a plus to just have everything in one spot.

Just a suggestion here. On bookmarks you can specify a keyword to execute that bookmark with a shortcut from the Awesome Bar. For example I would have g as a shortcut to do a Google search or a to perform an Amazon search and so on. Would it be possible to use this for Ubiquity. If I want to use Ubiquity in the Awesome Bar then just type u then the command and then the parameters like u map chattanooga, tn.

Then as mentioned in Design 1 to get back to the normal state of the URL bar all you would have to do is back out the text entered.

Hi,

I just want to notify you guys, and especially you, Aza, about this thread I have create at the Mozilla Labs Forum about Ubiquity, and how I think it’s potential and greatness is wasted by being enclosed in Firefox.

https://labs.mozilla.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=4989&page=1

We have been looking at some very similar issues. Email is such a structured data set that we wanted to help people complete on objects/ideas in a similar manner to verbs and nouns.

Here are some examples:
http://clarkbw.net/designs/toolbar/thunderbar.png
http://clarkbw.net/designs/toolbar/toolbar-search-examples.png

I think we came to similar conclusions wrt to design attempts, however I’m interested in continuing with the current ubiquity format. Perhaps it’s just a matter of adding in a [ History > search element that is the default with awesomebar completions to the right. Design 3 seems almost full circle, if you only just declared that the awesome bar results are a history search.

Always looking forward to more

Would be cool if you took the first design, but instead make the favicon/chrome part clickable.

That way you could click on it and have a list of actions to choose from in the form of a drop down.

I’d like to do some deeper thinking about this, but one quick reaction:

The Awesome Bar (or more generally, the big field at the top of any browser window) is so strongly associated with the location of the current page that it seems odd to contemplate using the same field to invoke commands that perform non-navigational functions (e.g., commands that, instead of “going” anywhere, modify the content of the current page, perform an action without changing pages, or do all of their work in the preview pane).

Perhaps it won’t be an issue — people might acclimate easily to the change — but my instinct is that there will be some tricky details to work out in terms of setting expectations and providing feedback when the action to be taken is not fundamentally navigational.

Designs 2&3 use both a keyboard and a mouse from what I can tell. This is very bad in terms of usability. I personally want to keep the locationbar a locationbar, but hey, taking the search bar and changing it into a “tools” bar would do better.

Before you go live with this in Firefox, you definitely need to have a command-writing contest. I’d love to see the whiz-bang killer appz a little competition would produce.

Maybe during a release candidate, so it has more publicity, but the commands are finished in time to roll them out with the final release.

@Chris Buchholz:

You’re looking for Ubiquity’s predecessor: http://humanized.com/enso/

The first time I read this, I thought the awesome bar was a great place, but the more I think about this, the more I think this isn’t so good, I think instead of ubiquity coming to the awesome bar, the awesome bar should come to ubiquity. My point is, if you build an interface much more like the one you have right now, it would allow the browser to dedicate 100% screen real estate to the content. Also, by building it out in a more quicksilver style, this would allow for the eventual expansion out of the browser itself and onto the desktop, without having to totally transfer from the awesome bar back to a more similar state to how it is now.

Just something worth considering, also, on a slightly unrelated topic and as a slight gripe, why do we still have the search bar when the awesome bar has that function built in?

Exactly. Isn’t searching one of the Ubiquity applications? No need for dedicated UI real estate. Move it under Ubiquity. Same applies to address bar as typing in the URL can be addressed in Ubiquity too. Suddenly, we get significant space freed up.
Next step is incorporating mouse gestures to get rid of the key-hole buttons.
Go on Aza, you know the way now.

Hey Aza,

As always, I’m super excited by Ubiquity, and I’m relieved to see localization mentioned in your post!

This said, let me bitch about your blog template design:

It would be great to have the date of the post somewhere on the post page. Many people don’t think about this when they design templates, but it really makes sense to know when something was published. In this particular case, I could more or less guess the publishing date thanks to the comments, but it’s just guessing. Since I was sent the URL by a friend, I don’t see the date that is mentioned on the home page of the blog.

Other than that, keep up the good^W awesome work!

I feel that Ubiquity belongs where the search bar belongs right now, replacing the Search Bar’s verb commands with something more powerful and extensible. The address bar has been marked by using noun searches and typing web addresses in; at this point, trying to add functionality such as Ubiquity to the Awesomebar would only confuse users and serve to hide features. I know that I only rarely type in search commands into the location bar. The idea of typing only web addresses into the location bar is so ingrained in my mind that adding Ubiquity’s search features would only serve to confuse or annoy me, and possibly others. I can certainly imagine mixing up web URLs and Ubiquity search results if Ubiquity was integrated into the Awesomebar; the results look far too similar.

Simply put, use those same ideas of integrating Ubiquity with the Search bar, not the Awesomebar. That reduces redundancy and improves workflow.

I think this feature needs its own workflow so that it can evolve without having to worry about conflicting with already complex features like the awesome bar.

Some notes and rough wireframes:
http://keisukeomi.com/ubiquity-in-firefox/round-1/

On a side note, if we are going to replace the search bar, we’d have to better integrate mycroft plugins into ubiquity.
I think its also important to have a configuration to revert back to the old way for those who don’t want this, especially if we are going to put it in the awesome bar.

Firefox already has support for keywords, I have a set of bookmarks for commonly used search engines where I replace the query with %s and assign a keyword like “gg” for Google, granted this sort of thing isn’t setup by default, the great thing about this is that I can replace the keyword with anything that I want later on if I decide to adopt a different keyword, and I can add support for any number of search engines provided I can figure out where the query is in the URL.

Assuming Ubiquity were to intrude on the URL bar, as I view it since this approach already works well for me, I’d want the ability to add any search engine in a similar way, as well as change the keyword if I find that “gg” has become too much of a habit and some better search engine comes out in the future.

Of course this keyword function could be extended to any Ubiquity command, for example in the second mock-up you have buttons appear in the address bar for the command, so if I were using a twitter command to post to twitter I could do something like “search” tab and my default search engine would appear there, or I could type “gg” tab and Google (my default search engine) would appear, but if I did “search” I could tab twice perhaps for a different search engine, perhaps my second favorite engine or a vertical of my favorite (Google Maps for example), or I could type “map” and cycle through first my default map provider and then a list of other map providers, so in this way I’d have two different keywords, I’d have a keyword for the category that I want, and I’d have a keyword for a specific search engine, so in this way I could have a number of maps providers or search engines available to me without having to assign a specific keyword to them, say maybe I don’t use them enough to bother remembering what that keyword would be, but I might occasionally want to make use of it for some reason or another, but the most important thing is that I would have complete control over my preferences of what those keywords are and how I wish to use them.

As far as a mouse-based UI goes, as long as there was a way to turn it off, it’s not a bad idea for those that prefer that.

Sebastian

The mouse-over thingy should be in the right-click menu

Of these designs, I think #1 looks best as doesn’t add extra buttons and has a colour that looks ‘dynamic’.

But it doesn’t look like you can use natural language there: the Map command is heavily separated from the address argument. What was wrong with your original mockup?
http://www.azarask.in/gfx/future_ubiquity.png

Also, is it really neccessary to introduce a new mode to the AwesomeBar? As you noted, this design requires a way to get back to the URL-going state. Most screens are large enough to put the preview box inside the list with other (URL) suggestions.

I’m actually a little surprised that this hasn’t been brought up already but I think #1 needs to be tweaked a bit.

Design #1 mixes metaphors too much with the identity button. The identity button is a place for *website* identity and *security* information. Ubiquity does not have anything to do with website identity and security. Obviously, #1 looks better than the rest because it is more polished. However, I think #2 (with more polish, and maybe #1’s drop-down menu) would be the best choice.

Also, just a thought, you might want to consider renaming the Location Bar to the Action Bar if the Location bar and Ubiquity are combined.

Keep up the good work, guys!

Aza, as what you always say: Let’s reduce the UI. Personally I like design #1. No additional elements or pop-ups which will irritate users. Only the wanted output is visible. All together a good reuse of the awesome bar.

Well, since it seems quite natural to use / to get to a seach maybe the text interface should start #!

Search bar must die!!! I have already switched it of and use Search keywords only (search keywords are kind of forgotten and yet they are doing essentially the same what Ubiquity does now).