Ubiquity, a
legacy extension for
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...
, was a collection of quick and easy
natural-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 allowed Web users to create new commands without requiring much technical background.
Overview
Ubiquity's main goal was to take a disjointed web and bring a user everything they need. This was accomplished through a
command-line
A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternativ ...
-like interface that was based on
natural language commands. These commands were supplied both by
Mozilla
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...
and by individual users. Commands were written in
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have ...
or
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (prog ...
and either directly typed into the command editor that comes with Ubiquity or subscribed to. Commands to which a user subscribed were automatically updated when the author updated the code. Up to the end of development, there was no limit as to what these commands can do, posing a large security risk. There were plans for Ubiquity to have a trust network that would allow users to evaluate the trustworthiness of a particular command before subscribing to it, but these plans never came to fruition.
Ubiquity had commands that allowed users to insert maps anywhere, translate on-page, highlight any code, and many other features.
Development history and roadmap
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 command feeds. 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 measures.
After Mozilla ceased development of Ubiquity, a community-maintained version was actively developed until 2016.
See also
*
Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey is a userscript manager made available as a Mozilla Firefox extension. It enables users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content after or before the page is loaded in the browser (also known as augmen ...
*
iMacros
iMacros was a browser-based application for macro recording, editing and playback for web automation and testing. It was provided as a standalone application and extension for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer web browsers. D ...
*
EMML
Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML) is an XML markup language for creating enterprise mashups, which are software applications that consume and mash data from variety of sources. These applications often perform logical or mathematical operat ...
*
Mozilla Jetpack
Jetpack was a working group which wrote a software development kit for Firefox add-ons. They produced the Add-on SDK, a set of APIs, a runtime, and a command-line tool for creating and running add-ons, and the Add-on Builder, a Web-based inte ...
References
External links
*
Ubiquity on wiki.mozilla.org.
{{Mozilla projects
Free Firefox legacy extensions
Mashup (web application hybrid)
Mozilla