A marketing manager e-mails a sales rep telling him to go to a conference in Berlin. The rep, while reading the e-mail, types in "book this". His computer looks up the flights, books the most convenient return ticket with an aisle seat, finds the nearest four-star hotel, books a room, and puts the details in his calendar. And sends his wife some flowers to apologise for missing a meal out they had arranged.

This sort of web experience is not science fiction. It is just around the corner and a new experimental widget, or browser extension, called Ubiquity is pointing the way.

Ubiquity is an attempt to connect up the web so that it becomes easier and more intuitive to use. It has been launched by the Mozilla Foundation, the open-source organisation behind the successful Firefox web browser.

When Ubiquity is downloaded onto a computer, the extension allows a user to call up a "command box" at the top of whatever page is on the browser. A user can then type a command, using ordinary "natural" language, into the box to perform a range of everyday internet actions. For instance, to create a map of a location, all a user has to do is type in the word "map" and the name of the location. Ubiquity will automatically find and pull up the right map, and it can easily be inserted into an e-mail or another web page.

Review: intuitive system that guards against crashes

Anything with the clout and brains of Google behind it should look good and operate efficiently and Chrome does. But it's early days

• Chrome: the bloggers' take on Google's new browser

• Google turns up heat on Microsoft with Chrome's global debut

Related Links

• Can virtual life take over from real life?

• Second Life affair leads to real life divorce

• Review: intuitive system that guards against crashes

Aza Raskin, who is leading the development of Ubiquity, explains: "You're writing an e-mail to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You'd like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed.

"This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven't even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them. For the most part people are left trundling between websites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time."

The new feature allows users to perform quick Wikipedia, Google, YouTube and restaurant review searches, add maps to e-mail, translate a snippet of a web page, check the weather, e-mail highlighted text to a friend, and look for a book on Amazon.com. All just using simple instructions typed into the command box.

Ubiquity, still an experimental prototype with many limitations and faults, has months of testing and development before it even reaches a beta release stage. The purpose of the early release of the experiment is to allow people to try it and, crucially, for developers to solicit worldwide feedback and suggestions for improvements. The Mozilla Foundation, a leading proponent of open-source web development, is a not-for-profit organisation with only 200 employees worldwide. But it has an online community of thousands of supporters who contribute and test. All its work, its products and the computer code behind them are open and available for everyone to use free of charge.

The Mozilla Foundation has a good track record. Its Firefox browser was launched four years ago and it now has more than 200 million users worldwide - about 20 per cent of the market. It is possible that, if Ubiquity does not turn into a fully-fledged product itself, some of its attributes will be included in future versions of the Firefox browser.

Chris Beard, who heads the Mozilla Labs team overseeing the Ubiquity project, said: "The internet has increasingly become an integral part of people's lives. We started thinking about the interface that people use for the internet - their browser. Essentially it has not changed for more than ten years. We wanted to empower people to be able to customise their experience and make it better."

The search box on the Firefox browser, called the AwesomeBar, shows how Ubiquity might develop. The AwesomeBar uses previous searches to suggest what a user might be looking for even before you finish typing a word. In other words, the browser knows what you like to look for and can help you find it again.

In the near future, someone might be able to type "book this", as above, because the browser knows what actions have previously been carried out. The Ubiquity program might be able to scan the e-mail currently open, understand that it needed to look at the conference in Berlin and then go away to look at flights. It could use previous bookings for flights to understand which UK airport to use and chose the nearest airport in Germany. It could know that before, you used British Airways and always preferred an aisle seat near the back. And so on. Ubiquity could also know your credit card details, your contacts and have access to your calendar. It would send flowers to your wife because you had told it that, if ever an event mentioning her was cancelled, flowers would be required.

All this is already possible from a technical point of view. The greatest hurdles are more likely to be privacy and security. The basic problem of giving a computer credit card details and passwords so that it can book tickets automatically is an obvious difficulty. How do you ensure enough security so that criminals could not take over your Ubiquity and spend all your money?

Many people would also be horrified to know that their lives can be so minutely traced through what they do on their computers. But it is all there, in one form or another, in the browsing history of every PC and laptop. Formulating rules that so that users can choose what to allow a computer to do and how to act on the information collated is something that has yet to be addressed by Mozilla's developers. It is, Mr Beard admits, very early days and such matters are key if this is to become a widespread public tool.

But the possibilities have already caught the attention of the tech community and Ubiquity is being watched carefully. Hundreds of volunteer developers have made suggestions for more uses for the command box and are writing code.

A further exciting possibility is that if Mozilla - or anyone else, since all this is open-source - can add speech recognition to the command box idea, you might soon be able to highlight some text or a web page and say: "e-mail this to Mike." And your computer would do exactly that. And that takes Ubiquity into the realm of Star Trek and a thousand other sci-fi movies.

Click here for more details about Ubiquity, including a tutorial and how to download it

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming