The days of the traditional web where we have to “go” somewhere to do something are ending. Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs project that is a bit like a command-line for the web. It is powerful because it allows you to use a bunch of common web-tools without leaving the pages you actually care to visit.

One really cool thing about Ubiquity is that you don’t have to type “add-to-calendar blah blah”. If you type “add”, Ubiquity will figure out what you want so you just have to type: “add beer with David Walsh at 9pm” and it will figure it out. If you have text selected, just type “this” and it will insert the selected text into that part of the command.

Get started with Ubiquity

While using Firefox, download the Ubiquity Firefox extension. Once you have it, you can install extra commands by clicking any of the command links above. You can summon Ubiquity with Ctrl-Space by default, but this is easily changed. That’s all!
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Before Firefox 3 was released I wrote about exclusive Firefox userChrome.css hacks got a TON of responses and requests. So in the spirit of "teaching a man to fish", I’m providing a tutorial on how to use Firefox’s DOM Inspector add-on to tweak whatever you want.

Suppose we want to remove that bookmark star on the right side of the URL bar. I’ll show you a simple way to do this and then generalize the technique for use with anything.

Setup

If you didn’t get the DOM Inspector when you downloaded Firefox, you’ll obviously want to do that first. Open it up by hitting Tools > DOM Inspector or key in Ctrl+Shift+I (default). You’ll want to start out by going to File > Inspect a Chrome Document and choosing the first option which is your Firefox window.

Find your target

The easiest way to check it out is to inspect it by clicking the button and clicking on the star. The DOM Inspector is helpful here because it will highlight the block containing the star with a big red border and show you the markup in the browser document with the XML element highlighted. Continue reading →

Suppose you need to send a friend a copy of say… Firebug 1.2 (site down at time of writing), but your favorite backup utility is not compatible with Firefox 3 yet. Not to worry! Just zip it up and send it like so:

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