The beauty of today's search engines is their simplicity. Type a few keywords into an empty box, and see the 10 most relevant results.

This week, Mozilla Labs expects to launch a similar interface for its Firefox Web browser. The new interface, called Ubiquity, lets users carry out all sorts of complex tasks simply by typing instructions, in the form of ordinary sentences, into a box in the browser.

For example, to e-mail a paragraph or picture from a Technology Review article to a friend using Ubiquity, simply select the text or image, press a keyboard shortcut to reveal an input box, and type "e-mail to Max."

The idea, says Beard, is to make it easier to find and share information on the Web while avoiding cumbersome copy-and-paste instructions.

Ubiquity aims to eliminate both tiresome mouse movements and the need for multiple browser plug-ins.

The project is being released in an early form--version 0.1--so it's not expected to work perfectly straightaway.