Blair’s Brain

And Other Unfocused Things

Private Browsing command for Ubiquity

November12

One of the cool new features of the upcoming Firefox 3.1 is Private Browsing. Essentially, when you enable Private Browsing, nothing of what you do in Firefox is recorded. Great when you want to hide something from a nosy flatmate. So in Ubiquity fashion, here’s a command to easily toggle Private Browsing mode.

Once you’ve subscribed to that command, all you need to do is open Ubiquity, and start typing “private-browsing”. Typing “p” may even be enough, depending on the commands you have. By default, it will toggle Private Browsing to the opposite of the state its currently in. You can also explicitly specify whether you want it on or off by specifying “on” or “off” respectively. That way you don’t have to actually remember or check whether you’re already in Private Browsing.

Screenshot of Private Browsing command

Screenshot of Private Browsing command

The command can be subscribed to from here:
http://theunfocused.net/moz/ubiquity/verbs/?cmd=private-browsing

Note: You’ll need to be running a nightly build of Firefox 3.1, or 3.1 beta 2 (when it gets released) or newer.

posted under Mozilla, Ubiquity
6 Comments to

“Private Browsing command for Ubiquity”

  1. On November 12th, 2008 at 4:37 pm amau Says:

    I have a probleme, since version 0.1.2 of ubiquity, with firefox 3.1 nightly, ubiquity doesn”t work anymore…

  2. On November 12th, 2008 at 6:00 pm Blair McBride Says:

    amau: Could you report your issues to http://groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-firefox/ - including any errors in the Error Console you get, and any other extensions you have installed.

  3. On November 13th, 2008 at 7:46 am Luís Reis Says:

    Isn’t Ubiquity supposed to be a “natural language” command line? In that case, wouldn’t “turn on private browsing” or “turn private browsing on” be easier?

  4. On November 13th, 2008 at 10:15 am Ehsan Akhgari Says:

    Blair, this is awesome work! Actually I had never thought about it myself, but it makes a lot of sense!

    Keep up the good work! :)

  5. On November 13th, 2008 at 11:27 am Blair McBride Says:

    Luís Reis: Yes, part of Ubiquity is natural language. But its also about making things as easy to use as possible - I figured “turn private browsing on” was more verbose that it needed to be. Plus there are limitations where we can’t yet use spaces in command names.

    Ehsan Akhgari: Thanks!

  6. On November 14th, 2008 at 3:13 pm amau Says:

    done :

    http://groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-firefox/browse_thread/thread/d5000b309954661d

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