Mozilla Labs recently announced the formation of a new group that will focus on the research and development of developer tools for the Open Web. “We believe that there’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in tools that increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.” Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian, the Ajax Experience, and long-time supporters of the Open Web have joined Mozilla in a full-time capacity to lead the new project. For more information, please see the Mozilla Labs blog post.

Aza Raskin has put together a short video tutorial on how to turn your Firefox bookmarklets into Ubiquity commands. “Bookmarklets are clickable actions (technically a link containing some Javascript) that can be added to the bookmarks bar of your browser. They’re a good way of getting control of the web back into users’ hands, by allowing them to add whatever new functionality they want to the websites they visit. The main problem with bookmarklets is that they don’t provide a scalable solution for accessing their functionality. You can only have so many buttons on the toolbar before they become unusable.” There’s a new utility function in Ubiquity that makes it trivial to turn any bookmarklet into a Ubiquity command, and Aza’s video tutorial shows you how to do it.