Ubiquity, the extension that adds command line functionality to the Firefox browser, got a major upgrade this week. Ubiquity 0.5 supports a bunch of new languages and drops the need to use hyphens in commands. The development team is also experimenting with "smart suggestions," a feature that lets Ubiquity make educated guesses about the meaning of unfamiliar data.

The good news is Ubiquity 0.5 adds nice features and updates to this handy tool. The bad news is that it breaks compatibility with third-party commands. That is sure to cause headaches and workflow problems for some of Ubiquity's 400,000 users. Fortunately, Mozilla has a plan.

Since it was first released, one of the Google Chrome browser's claims to fame has been how it splits the work of displaying web pages and running web applications among multiple processes. This makes the browser more stable, and increases performance. Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg put up a post last month on Electrolysis, an effort at Mozilla to allow the Firefox browser to take advantage of multiple processes. Smedberg confirms there that Mozilla has been looking at this challenge since before Chrome arrived. As Ars Technica reports, multiple processes are indeed coming to Firefox, and should make it more stable and more secure. And that's not all that's coming.

Ubiquity is a very popular Firefox extension that adds a flexible natural language command line to Firefox, and is developed by the folks at Mozilla. It's now out in a more useful new version, with a sleeker look, a more stable core, and the ability to create good looking skins, as we covered here. If you're familiar with using the Awesome Bar in Firefox, it's easy to take to Ubiquity quickly, although it pays to spend a little time learning how its commands work. Now, Mozilla is working aggressively to bring some of Ubiquity's power to Firefox, and has come up with a prototype and demo of how "TaskFox" (Ubiquity's features running natively in Firefox) will work.