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."'"

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[BhaKi]

If the code written so far is well documented, there should be no problem for anyone to continue development.

I could see this one coming...

[Jugalator]

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.

Re:Ubiquitous

[icebike]

You might also say that Raskin works from a different definition of "Huge Demand" than the rest of us.

"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,"

Ah, no, Raskin, there isn't a huge demand for this. I don't want to deal with my bank account while logged into Google, and I don't want to have every thing I do on the web done from one place.

"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.

Again Wrong Wrong Wrong. Less than .002 percent of web users have even the slightest desire to command the web the way they want, and even fewer want to "write snippets of code". Its time to expand your world view beyond your hacker-cave.

Ubiquity gave everyday developers a voice with how the browser and the Web works."

"Everyday developers"? WTF? So finally at the end of the quote it becomes clear he was talking about 1/1000th of web users, the people who use the web for development daily, who probably managed just fine without Ubiquity.

This project deserved to die.