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."'"

Comments

Open Source Projects

[sopssa]

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.

Re:Open Source Projects

[Anonymous Coward]

At least when [insert big company] does get this working they wont be able to patent it stop others doing it.

Re:Open Source Projects

[sopssa]

With closed source/proprietary projects it usually happens for different reasons, mostly income being the reason. With proprietary projects there will always be coders, and the existing coders will stay coding, because there is income involved with that. Money is a good motivator to continue doing projects you otherwise would had lost interest on.

Great example of this is really the games. Gaming industry develops some really stunning games, and theres big corporations like EA, Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft and then theres the small indie developers and everything in between. But what about open source games? They're mediocre at best, almost always unfinished, and otherwise pretty much shitty. These are long projects, taking up to 500-2000+ men work years to finish, and the quality difference in that comes from the fact that the developers are paid to have the interest to finish the product instead of jumping to their latest new idea.

Re:Open Source Projects

[Lunix Nutcase]

Yes but the difference between OSS and proprietary software is that if the main OSS developers just lose interest in the project, the project can be forked/development work taken over by another part of the OSS community.

Sure in an ideal world. In the real world, though, it just means the project stagnates and dies.

Re:Open Source Projects

[Thinboy00]

Wesnoth isn't "shitty" nor "mediocre"

Re:Open Source Projects

[lymond01]

It happens all the time in closed source projects too, you just never hear about them

If a tree falls in the woods and I don't hear it, do I care? No. Open source is generally publicly known, especially if it is a large project, so I do feel a bit of remorse when I know a project has been abandoned by its lead.

Re:Open Source Projects

[sopssa]

But has there been any open source games that are good at story, art, animation, music, dialog and vocal performance? Those are actually the things that are missing in them most of all. As someone here points out, there's technical problems like path finding etc too, but some of the games are technically ok (like nethack, as the previous poster mentioned). But they all lack that polished art, music and story even more.

Re:Open Source Projects

[Lotana]

What about Wesnoth though? What's it based on?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohan:_Immortal_Sovereigns

Ubiquitous

[pitchpipe]

... the project is no longer being actively developed.

You might even say that Ubiquity is not Ubiquitous.

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.

In a nutshell

[93 Escort Wagon]

Remember Mozilla Ubiquity?

No.

Follow best practices

[BhaKi]

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

Re:Follow best practices

[farble1670]

yes in theory. in practice, this what i've seen. even in a corporate environment where people are paid to maintain and enhance the old code, the new developers never quite "get it". they are able to fix bugs and add features all right, but it's done with without a vision of the overall project. the result is the code slowly loses maintainability and eventually needs to be re-written (or tossed).

maybe this is poor engineering, but it could also just be physiological. developers are less interested in code when they do not feel ownership. coming in and learning someone else's methodology that you probably don't agree with or even like is just not fun. when developers are paid to do it, they get the job done but don't follow through with the care they would otherwise have if they wrote the code from scratch.

Why are we surprised?

[Ltap]

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.

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.