> Firefox had an amazing plugin called "Ubiquity", which was basically like command line for your browser and you could write custom scripts for it.

oh man, i was a core developer for ubiquity (i wasn't the best core developer out there, but i was trying to help)[0]. it was an amazing tool, great devs working on it, mozilla was helping... but all of sudden, everybody just stopped.

i really wish it would come back. it was one of the best developing experiences i had in my life.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/ubiquity/commits?author=fernandot...

Ubiquity was amazing.

It was sort of like a launcher in a browser combined with IFTTT. You could use it to chain together APIs and reduce them to natural language commands.

You could highlight "abogado," translate it, get a map to the nearest one, shorten the url to that map, and email that shortened url to a friend all with one nearly natural language command.

I'm not that great at coding, but even I was able to write a few scripts (verbs?) for it. The simple scripting language for interacting with APIs was one of the most well crafted things about that project.

Ubiquity was ppioneered by Aza Raskin (son of Jess Rasking, designer the original Mac interface). I always had the feeling that uqiquity never was a Mozilla project per say, it was more his personal project that he happened to do inside Mozilla. Perhaps he left or got promoted and the project stopped. I am only guessing.

The Mac interface has little to do with Ubiquity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDfpw97Tz0

This is Aza demoing the beta version, and to me it seems to build more on Archy than anything WIMP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

Apologies, I wasn't trying to imply a connection between the Mac interface and Ubiquity, just wanted to put Aza's love for UX in context by mentioning his father's work. I also didn't know about Archy.

Ubiquity was really awesome. May be I should build an electron app and resurrect it.

> Tab Groups

Still works, I use it on a daily basis. It's just an addon now. It will probably continue to work for a few years, they've been wanting to get rid of it since 2013 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836758) and it's still there.

But I'd be glad to hear of any alternatives!

I've seen this plugin but I don't understand the use case. Group of tabs = a browser window.

Am I missing out on a productivity boost?

You could easily name tab groups, and view previews of tabs within a group on one screen. It was also fairly trivial to move tabs between groups, when compared to the "joys" of dragging tabs between windows.

Anything to do with browsers could be boiled down to "replaced by using windows" - but there are some definite benefits to sticking within one window.

The tabs don't load into memory unless you switch to that tab group. Also it's much easier to work with one window. You know how before tabs were invented, you had to open each website in a new window. It was a pain in the ass. Tab groups is just the next step. They are like meta-tabs.

II have a tab group for each topic/task I'm working on. I have about 10 groups/80 tabs total, so if I open them all at once it takes a while. With tab groups non active tabs are not loaded right away, so when I'm working I e.g. don't need to open all the tabs where I'm planning a vacation open. I used to use lots of different sessions before discovering tab groups, but it was slower and I lost track of sessions often. Tab Group makes life just a bit easier.

I have a difficulty with separate windows: They all look the same. I'd use a tabgroup for the doc (MDN, StackOverflow), another for the website I'm building (2-3 tabs because you enter data in the first page, view it in the second), and another group for live websites (gmail & co). Total a dozen tabs, well organized in hierarchical manner.

Personally I agree, especially with Mac's CMD+` to cycle through them.

But I guess it adds another level for grouping things that are in the same window but slightly different, or maybe some people are just prejudiced against multiple browser windows..

The only thing I can think of that isn't just down to "how you use it" would be grouping tabs in the same cookie session, but not persistent - i.e. an incognito window with a bunch of tabs you want to organise, but share cookies. That being important seems like a stretch though.

Well, on Mac CMD+` doesn't cycle through full screen windows.

I tend to open a lot of tabs, so it was convenient to have an easy way to group them by topic or environment without closing up my windows manager with multiple FF windows.

If you think about it, tabs themselves are just an effort to avoid multiple browser windows.

Have you tried theoldreader.com? Not sure if search is free since I'm on their paid account, but the feeds definitely update more reliably than other readers I tried, especially with private one-subscriber feeds.

Never used search before, but it seems to work on a free account.

theoldreader is maybe not as fast as Google Reader but it replaced it for me perfectly. Love the third party integration (greader for Android) and its handling.

Have you tried Digg's RSS reader? I've been using it a bit lately, and like it well enough.

http://digg.com/reader.

Digg reader randomly losses state and shows me days of stuff as unread again. I also frequently have to use "mark all read" to clear out the bolded feed name, even if there are no items shown. I've also seen it stop updating a feed for days and then suddenly showing a half dozen items.

I use Digg reader because it seems better than most alternatives, but it's not as reliable and consistent as Google Reader.

I don't think Digg Reader does search. Digg is good though, it's what I use.

Have you tried Bazqux as well? I've been extremely pleased with it and even signed up for a lifetime account.

https://bazqux.com/

I second that, I signed up for a year and will likely sign up for lifetime at the end of it.

I'm a huge fan of Inoreader. It is almost an exact clone, but with some extra features like subscribing to a Twitter feed, and filtering feeds.

Another huge fan here. I started paying for Inoreader out of appreciation, not to access any paid features.

Feedly is about the closest I've got to Reader, after trying Digg and a few others.

Yeah, when Google announced they'll be shutting down Reader, Feedly was amongst the first to offer an automated migration. I use and love Feedly since then...

+1 for Google reader. Never found anything like it.

I am very happy with Feedbin but I know what you mean – and Feedbin of course cannot be free. I am nevertheless glad that alternatives sprang up, the first weeks after the end of Google Reader were difficult.

I use Newsblur now, and it is really good.

Yeah, Newsblur rocks. I also find it a great watching a single committed developer (Samuel Clay[0]), build a small business with an Open Source code-base [1].

[0] http://www.newsblur.com/about

[1] https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

+1 for newsblur, I switched there from Google Reader. I read feeds a LOT less now, but, mostly for lack of time, not because I dislike newsblur.

Not free, but Inoreader is very, very good: http://www.inoreader.com

I never did the Google Reader thing, so I'm not sure how they compare though.

Give AOL Reader a try (I know) http://reader.aol.com/

AOL Reader was what I settled on as well after Google Reader shutdown. I was never a power user so AOL Reader feels like a perfect replacement for Google Reader's feature set. It can be a bit flaky at times with managing read state, though that seems to be a UI issue that resets itself fairly quickly.

Sadly you cannot register to AOL from outside the states, they require a us phone number.

Twilio or Google Voice?

How was Google Reader different than other feed readers such as the one built into Thunderbird? I didn't use it so I can't compare, but Thunderbird works well for me here.

Side note: I also use it to subscribe to YouTube channels without a Google account.

I could access Google Reader from any device with a web browser.

Thunderbird requires that I have an application installed on the device.

Thunderbird also cannot magically backfill a new subscription. Google Reader could, because pretty much guaranteed, someone else was subscribed already so Google had the history.

Thunderbird can't, but Feedly can

I used Feedly for a while and found it to be flaky, in pretty much the same ways as Digg reader.

Which ways? (I haven't tried Digg Reader.)

I feel like Feedly is okay. Free native apps and sync is nice. I wish it didn't auto mark read after 30 days though. I tend to do my rss processing in huge batches and miss stuff because of that.

I haven't used it in a while, but my recollection is that it would regularly "forget" that I'd already read items, and days of stuff would show as new again. And other times it would show feeds as unread even though it didn't have any items shown unread.

I also recall not liking the interface but cannot recall now exactly what it was. Feedly is the one that provides a chrome extension instead of just a website, right?

The weird thing is their web version / chrome app never has the state problems for me. But the mobile version on iOS screw s up regularly. I'll reach the end of my feed with the "all done" screen and upon refresh all the stuff I just read pops back as unread. Really annoying.

The way they implemented social worked well for me. It was like a mini-HN with my friends.

Ubiquity reminds me of quicksilver.

inoreader.com

I've actually been happier with Inoreader than Google Reader.

My biggest problem with inoreader is there are feeds I subscribe to that it either doesn't recognize as feeds or won't update them for some reason. That makes it an instant fail for me. Which is a shame; I love the interface.

Weird. I've never experienced that. Might be worth contacting their support.

+1 for ubiquity. Most useful productivity tool for web browsering ever.

After removing tab groups I see literally zero reasons why anyone should use firefox. It's slower, more buggy copy of Opera and Chromium ;/

For me, a) pentadactyl is better than Vimium, b) FF seems faster (I know, subjective), and c) Mozilla is much less likely to have been centrally logging something about me without my explicit permission.

I'm using both Firefox and Opera on mg laptop and they don't feel any different regarding speed or crashes.

I use it for the history search in the address bar, it seems to remember far more history than Chrome which is really useful when I'm looking for that StackOverflow thread I read the other day.

My was one issue with Chrome: it didn't have the magic history search in the URL bar that Firefox.

UNTIL I discovered that if you disable "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs" option for the Omnibar it works PERFECTLY, just like Firefox. Type in any part of the URL or title of the page and bingo.

YES! Thank you!

Chrome only remembers history between now and 90 days ago.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/history-trends-unl...

As noted in the description, this extension resolves that permanently, although I'm still not quite sure how it impacts history sync or URL bar search.

I also think (totally unsure) that you might need to open the extension occasionally for it to save the history.

It's awesome though.

I use it instead of Chrome because it doesn't burn through my laptop battery by spawning threads that then consume all of my CPU.

I can't argue with your point of view. 'zero reasons' reminds me that language laughs with logic.