Ubiquity is a small Firefox add-on by Mozilla Labs, which goes beyond any add-on that you’ve ever used.

It’s in an early stage of development and still has attracted a lot of attention. Mozilla defines it as a tool that’s supposed to connect the web with words, but simply put, it’s a command line within Firefox that offers numerous useful commands. Say you stumbled upon a Chinese website and can’t understand a word of it. If you have Ubiquity installed you can highlight the text that seems the most interesting to you, press CTRL+Space (or the shortcut for summoning the command line that you’ve chosen) and type ‘translate’. Ubiquity uses online translators to do the job, but even so, it seriously simplifies the process.

Translate is just one of the many tasks you can perform with this hefty extension. You could highlight (or type in the command line) the name of your town, and type ‘weather’ and you’ll be instantly presented with the weather forecast. You can add dates to your Google calendar, you can calculate complex mathematical expressions, you can update your Facebook/Myspace status, you can view Google maps by highlighting the street name and typing ‘map’ in the command line, and much much more. The most exciting part about this add-on is that it’s still being shaped and developed. We can hardly wait for future version. Download the latest version for free from the Mozilla Labs site.