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Is Mozilla Ubiquity Dead?
darthcamaro writes "Remember Mozilla Ubiquity? It was an effort to bring natural language commands to the Firefox browser. Now after almost two years of development and a half million downloads, the project is no longer being actively developed. Project founder Aza Raskin is now working on other projects, including Mozilla Jetpack, so Ubiquity is on the back burner. '"There is huge demand for being able to connect the Web with language — to not have to move from one site to another to complete your daily tasks," Raskin said. "And there is huge demand for anyone to be able to write small snippets of code that lets them command the Web the way they want. Ubiquity gave everyday developers a voice with how the browser and the Web works."'"
It happens to a lot of OSS projects. Suddenly the developers interest just dies and they start doing something else. Just like in our childhood we coded some funny little game for a day (not that I didn't make some cool stuff back then :) and then started on an another project. It needs more motivation to continue some project past the starting interesting.
... the project is no longer being actively developed.
You might even say that Ubiquity is not Ubiquitous.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Remember Mozilla Ubiquity?
No.
#DeleteChrome
If the code written so far is well documented, there should be no problem for anyone to continue development.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
That's sad! I really wanted it to be a plugin for in all web browsers, if not built into them to create smooth and efficient waves when web surfing.
Ignoring whether or not it being free software makes a difference - every software company tried its hand at it in the 90s. Their main justification for dropping it was that "the technology isn't advanced enough". It all seems to be part of an attempt to copy Star Trek's tech and use voice commands for computers. In reality, voice commands are incredibly inefficient and imprecise, and it's virtually impossible for a piece of software to try and sort through accents, dialects, and mumbling to guess at the true intent.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
Not trying to be an annoying "see, I knew this" jerk, but really, this project was so far reaching and poorly defined in how much it should cover, that it was hard to even grasp what the end result should be, and thus also how to support the project. I'm not sure about others, but I have a much easier time building excitement for a project I know what the end result is supposed to be like, than something where the focus is on writing abstract documents on how the browser should more easily be able to be told what you want, and better ignore technical URL's... or something.
Well, yeah, that's an awesome idea, and so is being able to speak to an OS in a few words, and not have to go through the annoying process of clicking on five different icons and buttons to get there.
But it's also far reaching in scope, and not enough narrowed down. There were some concrete stuff done in it, but it felt like features sprawling in different directions, with no sense of direction. Being able to surf to Google Maps more easily, etc, but really with the extension wanting to do more. Hmm.. The article goes on with this
While conceptually, Taskfox and Ubiquity might seem similar, Raskin noted that Taskfox is actually quite different than Ubiquity.
"Taskfox is integrated directly into the URL bar and has a simplified grammar," Raskin said. "It's more accurate to think of Taskfox as a separate product which is Ubiquity-inspired, which has the potential to evolve towards a richer, more Ubiquity-like interface."
Rephrased, I think Taskfox has the right idea here. Software sometimes need to evolve from something more simple, but with a well-defined feature set, and *then* into something more advanced. Or you'll get software with ill defined scope in terms of features in practice, with less motivated developers behind it. Like Windows Longhorn. Or Ubiquity.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Mozilla Labs has started out on some great projects but they don't seem able to make it out into wider use. What happened to Weave, it's been kicking around for years? Ubiquity, a great start with developer/hacker interest, but the ball dropped.
I'm worried for how able Mozilla is to compete against the threat coming from Google and Chrome at the moment. Their core browser is falling behind on speed and stability and I think they'll find it hard to catch up given the size/age/complexity of the Firefox codebase compared to Chrome. Google had the opportunity to start from scratch with the knowledge of all the browser vulnerabilities in the last decade and have a much better architecture for security and stability. It's almost unfeasible for Mozilla to refactor firefox to match.
What they do have going for them is the collection of extensions and the new ideas from Mozilla Labs; if they don't get them out to the wider audience then their competitors will copy and popularise the best of them, essentially benefiting from free R&D.
At the time, I remember thinking how awesome it -could- be, but how limited it was at the moment.
Then I realized that it was the programmer in me talking... Having to type out written commands to make magic happen? That's the Linux command line and most non-techies are horribly afraid of that.
I can't see it happening... Some of the ideas may be used in a GUI medium instead, but the project as it was ... Well, it was pretty much doomed from the start.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Ha. I just went and read about this myself. Personally I found ubiquity really useful. I loved the way I could select a postcode, press a keyboard combo and then just type "map" to get an interactive Google Map. I especially liked the way I could subscribe to feeds of commands, most of which had a whole host of handy options. The natural language process part of it was simple, but easily good enough for the intended purpose.
The reason I stopped using it was because new versions weren't backwards compatible and cleaning up after an update became a bit of a mess. I don't know if others had the same experience?
I remember being rather excited when I first saw the demo for it. Now I generally only use it for translation and mapping. Anyone else think Ubiquity is screaming for speech recognition?
Cause last time I checked, we invented the web so we could get more beamtime, and this has nothing to do with getting me more beamtime.
Natural language has always been a fad - it comes and goes in cycles, or at least since the late 70s when I started.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Trust me, open source doesn't do well with user experience, interaction, graphic designers and researchers. You want a good product around open source, let open source community build code while hired designers/researchers do their job. All successful useful products go through iterative design process with a lot of user testing, usability testing. Ubiquity is a bad user experience product, throw it one interaction designer, one graphic designer, two-three user experience designers and a couple of researchers you have useful product Ubiquity Pro( $5 )
You sir, should be shot.
Damn shame. I used it all the time to create tinyurls, to translate text on the fly, and so on. It was a handy little utility, and I was excited with the direction they wanted to go it.
It'd be nice if they could even just do a version update so I could use it with Firefox 3.6.
Soylens viridis homines es
The unix shell is much better at interacting linguistically with a user than a browser with a bolted on keyword system. Use the right tool for the job, like Surfraw.
Frankly, the basic idea was not that bad. But everything was awful.
Basically, Firefox with Ubiquity had at least 3 things, to do the exact same thing:
1. The search input field (top right): Choose a search and enter the query.
2. The keyword search (URL field): Enter the keyword (e.g. dict), followed by the query.
3. Use Ubiquity, enter the keyword, and the parameters/query.
Of course, Ubiquity was more. Because it was a generalization of [1] and [2] to GET/POSTs with multiple fields.
But that could have easily be implemented right in the URL bar. (Or search field for people who prefer that. [Although I don’t know why.])
Then again, if you think that thing trough to the end, you gonna end up with a general property/option box and a general communication protocol between servers and clients. And such general solutions are great because they usually offer huge emergence (the ability to do much with little interface complexity).
But we already have that. More than once. And the newest standard is XForms.
Doesn’t make much sense to cram it into the browser UI itself though.
And I haven’t even talked about how when you think it trough to the very end, you just end up with algorithms and data structures again.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Vimperator replaced Ubiquity in my browser.
Burn FAT not OIL
for he kind of things i tried to do with it, i can do already with the search engines i installed, and keywords.
In fact, i remember trying out the examples and i had to type more. "w Firefox", is imo pretty fast.
Can't say I am surprised. I had never heard of it before, so I diligently clicked all the links in TFA. Yet, within a couple of minutes I still wasn't able to figure out what it was. There were not very useful comparisons with "Launchy", which I haven't heard of either. May be I need to see a live demo to "get it", or may be it is too ahead of its time, or may be it is just garbage. I really don't know, but either way it isn't surprising that it hasn't caught on.
I fiddled with Ubiquity for a while, but when I discovered Vimperator, I found I never used the darn thing.
Vimperator, the one plugin the keeps me on firefox. Of course the kids won't like it much since it requires the use of the keyboard.
I hope that Raskin resumes work on Archy, a really promising zooming user interface project started by his dad long ago.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
Dying out is a good thing. It's natural selection at work. This is why open source development is more agile and, in the long run, will produce better results than proprietary software development.
I thought I read somewhere it was being phased out of an addon because it was being rolled into the official firefox codebase and appear in the next major version. I really liked it, and while it seemed problematic (ie simply not working) for me, I'd like to see it continue.
'twasn't much, but I had hoped for Ubiquity everywhere, not just he browser. It needs to be an OS add-on.
-J
Ubiquity was just proof that even good projects can make bad decisions. It was DOA. It interestingly solved a problem by doing something no-one needed.
Quack, quack.
"And there is huge demand for anyone to be able to write small snippets of code that lets them command the Web the way they want."
What?
I will agree that the vast majority of American blacks that I have met were little more than unintelligent scumbags and thugs. There were a few decent ones and even a few very sharp ones, but sadly far too few.
European blacks are a different matter. Many of them are actually good, honest people.
Ah no!! I love Ubiquity it's the best tool out there for translating or getting dictionary definitions coincidentally when surfing the web
Mod parent up. Weave is great.
Sigh, first Enso and now Ubiquity?
God damn.
Or C, the successful black employer?
Or D, the single, fat, white man sitting at home with his wife who is pregnant with their fifth child waiting for the next welfare cheque?
Or E, the successful black politician who was popular enough to be elected as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth (with the backing of most of the international community) and is trying to clear up the mess left by his white predecessor who had to cheat his way into power.
Fuck you and your racism.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Can't help it but that name always makes me think of the Ubuntu installer instead of a Browser module.
I just watched the Ubiquity video again for the first time in years to refresh my memory. It's pretty awesome. But it's also a pretty major project that Mozilla can't really do themselves. Web sites need to implement "verbs" for it to work. And browsers other than Mozilla need to implement it too.
That said, I hope it comes back to life and improves. Hey, maybe this /. post will entice some readers to become Ubiquity developers. Maybe Google can help too and bring it to Chrome - and I don't mean as an extension, but a built in feature (Firefox too). If it's built-in, as opposed to an add on, more users will have access to it and web site developers will have a bigger audience to code verbs for.
Ubiquity inspired the Awesome Bar, which turned out to be useful enough for many. For others, Google has many commands that fill such needs that Ubiquity is considered as reinventing the wheel.