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Community-maintained version of Ubiquity for Firefox 3.6

Jono — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:05:30 +0000

Longtime Ubiquity contributor and community member Satyr has continued working on the Ubiquity codeline. He’s posted a build of the extension based on the latest source from his personal code repository.

Satyr’s build is based on the 0.5 codeline and it should be able to work with Firefox 3.6, so you may want to try it out if you have been frustrated by the incompatibility between Ubiquity 0.5.x and Firefox 3.6.

Satyr provides the caveat:

“latest source” means it is pre-beta and most likely has issues, which won’t be fixed unless users report them in detail.

Still, if you are using Firefox 3.6 and you want features that are not available in Ubiquity 0.1.9.1, you may want to try out Satyr’s build.

Problems and workarounds with this version are being discussed on GetSatisfaction.

Thank you Satyr!

Current Status of Ubiquity

Jono — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:18:37 +0000

The purpose of an experiment is to learn something – not neccessarily to make a product. The first phase of the Ubiquity experiment concluded in 2009. It was a success in that by doing it we learned a lot about both the power and the pitfalls of linguistic interfaces for the Web. Jono, one of the main Ubiquity developers, has written a retrospective on lessons learned from the Ubiquity project.

Labs is currently focusing its attention on other experiments. Which is not to say that Ubiquity is over; there will almost certainly be a phase II of the Ubiquity experiment at some point in the indefinite future.

In the meantime, there are still plenty of people who find the Ubiquity extension, experimental as it is, useful enough to keep using it in their daily web activities. Recently, many of these Ubiquity users have been asking for a version of the extension that is compatible with Firefox 3.6, so we’ve decided to do a set of maintenance releases to provide this compatibility.

We’ve already released an update to the 0.1 line, Ubiquity 0.1.9.1, which works with Firefox 3.6. It can be downloaded from Addons.mozilla.com.

The other branch of the codeline, the more experimental Ubiquity 0.5 branch, is turning out to be more difficult to update to Firefox 3.6 than we anticipated. We’re going to have to find some time to do some serious hacking and bug-fixing on it before we can release a compatible 0.5.x version. When we do, we will announce it on this page, so please stay tuned.

Re-Introducing Ubiquity

Martell — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:59:00 +0000

As a Labs project, Ubiquity is an investigation into two areas. The first is linguistic interfaces — interfaces where you type what you want to do. Can such an interface be made practical as a part of everyday internet use? Can it be made close enough to natural language that people can discover how to use it without special training? Does it have significant speed advantages over a mouse-based interface? Can it be made good enough at understanding the user’s intentions that it is just as usable as a point-and-click interface? Can it do all this for more languages than just English?

The second area of investigation is what we call verbifying the Web. More and more websites are things that you do rather than places that you go to. We Digg things, Tweet things, Google for things, blog things, map things, and so on. But in most cases, using one of these services requires copying some text, going to the appropriate website, and pasting it into a form. How about if the interface to the Web treated these services as tools that you can pick up and take with you, to use anywhere, instead of treating them as destinations?

Ubiquity commands are small chunks of javascript which can interface with web services. Any website can offer Ubiquity commands; any Ubiquity user who visits the site can see the commands and choose whether to subscribe to them. Once subscribed to, those commands can be used anywhere.