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Ubiquity, a legacy extension for
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, 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
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and by individual users. Commands were written in
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or
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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