Mozilla, the people behind the popular Firefox web browser, announced today a new project that could will change the way we engage with the internet.

Ubiquity has a simple goal: ‘to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do’.

The smartest part of the software is making use of language and allowing a computer to understand what we mean without us mere mortals having to modify our speech or writing patterns.

Imagine typing (or even saying) “book a flight for me from Manchester to London, leaving on Monday and returning on Wednesday, the cheapest, then email my colleagues in London office the flight details and add to my calendar. Oh and book me a hotel with at least four star reviews for the same dates.” You understand what I mean. If I had a personal assistant, they would probably make this happen. But my computer didn’t do anything. Not a thing.

As Aza points out:

“We aren’t there yet. Instead, we have the rudimentary systems of structured natural language commands. You can select something and Ubiq “translate this to French”, or “email it to Jono”. In both cases, Ubiquity is smart enough to realize what “this” and “it” refers to, as well as knowing who Jono is (by talking with my web-mail’s contact list). It’s also smart enough to be able to understand commands like “map Chicago Comics” and “yelp Tapas near SF” and give you rich previews and search results to get you where you want to be quickly. Even better, both of those commands let you insert results directly into, say, an email you’re writing so that you never have to interrupt your chain of thought.” Genius.

Robert Scoble notes that this will only be picked up by passionate internet users but I believe that once this is adopted by an even bigger player, most likely as copycat software introduced to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, that’s when everything changes.

I can even imagine Steve Jobs taking to the stage in a couple of years time to explain how the new version of Safari can take care of everything for you. Just type it in and BOOM!

There’s no need to wait for a keynote from Steve or Steve. If you’re a passionate internet user you can take a sneak peak at the future right now with this video. Or go one step further and download Ubiquity for Firefox.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.