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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.
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If the code written so far is well documented, there should be no problem for anyone to continue development.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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Don't you mean the late 50s? COBOL was more or less an attempt at natural language and arguably one of the most successful ones.
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