Ubiquity, an add-on for Mozilla Firefox, is a collection of quick and easynatural-language-derived commands that act as mashups of web services, thus allowing users to get information and relate it to current and other webpages. It also allows Web users to create new commands without requiring much technical background.
Overview
Ubiquity's main goal is to take a disjointed web and bring a user everything they need. This is accomplished through a command-line-like interface that is based on natural language commands. These commands are supplied both by Mozilla and by individual users. Commands are written in JavaScript or Python and either directly typed into the commandeditor that comes with Ubiquity or subscribed to. Commands to which a user subscribes are automatically updated when the author updates the code. At the moment there is no limit as to what these commands can do, which implies a large security risk. A planned feature for Ubiquity is a trust network that allows users to evaluate the trustworthiness of a particular command before subscribing to it. Ubiquity will allow users to insert maps anywhere, translate on-page, highlight any code, and many other features.
The architectural design for Ubiquity 0.1.3 was focused on separating functions into well-defined objects, an idea borrowed from the design of commands in the Archy project. The browser window functionality was separated into per-window and global objects. The per-window command manager object mediated between the context menu, command entry and natural-language parser objects and the commands themselves. The global objects marshall application-wide services such as built-in commandfeeds. Efforts to localize Ubiquity into different languages have also been made. The design goals for Ubiquity 0.5 focus on making it easier to experiment with new User Interfaces and implement security. After development of Ubiquity was ceased by Mozilla, a community-maintained version was actively developed until 2016.
