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Laboratories are where science and creativity meet to develop, research, and explore new ideas. Mozilla Labs embraces this great tradition — a virtual lab where people come together to create, experiment, and play with new Web innovations and technologies.


Ubiquity, Weave, Snowl, Personas, Prism, Test Pilot, ChromaTabs, The Coop; there's alot of exciting and innovative development going on through Labs.

http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/

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Ubiquity— adds a natural language command line to Firefox
Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Make it extremely easy to Extend browser functionality, and share new functionality with other users.
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Empower users to control the web browser using a natural-language-like command interface. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

More information: Ubiquity

Major Ubiquity Update
01.14.2009

" We are proud to announce Ubiquity 0.1.5. Since the last major update, Ubiquity has gained a sleeker look and a smarter, more stable core. Ubiquity has also gained the ability to be skinned: anyone who knows how to write standards-complaint CSS can now create and share a custom Ubiquity skin."

• Beautiful: Ubiquity has a new look that increases its visual simplicity and lays the groundwork for full keyboard access.
• Skinnable: Anyone can now give Ubiquity a new look. It’s as simple as a little bit of CSS. That’s how the new look was created! Once you’ve created a skin, it’s easy to share it with the world: you can subscribe to skins just like you can subscribe to commands.
• Speed: Ubiquity is now much snappier.
• Stability: This is the most reliable Ubiquity yet, with much of its internals refactored.
• Relevancy: Ubiquity now makes it easier to issue the commands you want. It remembers the commands you use — using the same technology that powers the Awesome Bar — as well as matching anywhere in a command name.

Announcement, more info & download: Ubiquity

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Introducing Weave
"As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.

One important area for exploration is the blending of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services.

We’re now launching a new project within Mozilla Labs to formally explore this integration. This project will be known as Weave and it will focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences."

More info @ Mozilla Labs

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Here's some good background reading about Weave.

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Weave has made great progress and is now up to: : Weave Weave 0.2.98 (0.3 M2+)
" We’ve released a release candidate for the next major update to Weave that includes significantly improved performance and bookmarks & history support for the new 0.3 server architecture. "

Weave v0.2.99 (January 27th, 2009)
* Fix problem where Weave would attempt to sync some internal structures, creating folders for each tab.
* Fennec UI is now in XUL, and includes many bugfixes
* Don't synchronize livemark contents (bug 468671)
* Simpler and faster reconciliation routines for history sync
* Be more resilient to microsummary service errors during sync
* Clients list now fully synced, but still lacking good UI to edit it
* Better login error reporting. As in, you actually get an error now (bug 471076)
* Make some internal data structures a little more lightweight, in an effort to improve memory usage
* Empty payloads (used for deleted items) are no longer encrypted

Weave v0.2.98 (January 9th, 2009)
* Fix a caching problem that resulted in the error "this._tail id null"
* Catch errors when changing history item IDs (bug 472480)
* Set GUID when creating history entries
* Add record parsing functionality to process incoming records as they are coming in (not hooked up yet)
* Fix a login problem where Weave would report a successful login, when it actually failed
* Several Fennec UI improvements and fixes
* History support on Fennec!
* Fix bug 472853
* Fix orphaned bookmarks if they are found locally

Weave v0.2.97 (January 6th, 2009)
* Enable Minefield support (3.2.*)
* Fix a problem where '0' was considered a valid Places item ID (but it's not)
* Simplify Engine definition for writing new Engines
* Sync clients list/names/types

Weave v0.2.96 (January 3rd, 2009)
* Improved memory performance
* More careful caching, explicit GCing
* Create bookmark/history records as they are needed instead of all in one go
* Fixed problems when syncing bookmark trees (bookmarks would end up jumbled), as well as ordering problems (correct folder but wrong index)
* Partially re-enabled syncing client guids and names