Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers
Mozilla Ubiquity dies an incredibly quiet death
Let me start off by saying I personally think Aza Raskin is a genius. Really. When Windows Phone 7 Series just came out, everyone was all amazed about how "the data is the UI", and how everything is so semantic and clean. Well, it's been done. Raskin did it quite a while back with the incredible (and sadly deserted) Enso Humanized launcher. This launcher was mind-blowingly cool. Really. It's still way ahead of Launchy and other Windows launchers, if you ask me. The guy is a true visionary.
Okay, but Raskin moved on to become head of User Experience in Mozilla Labs. He continued working his magic there too, and came up with Ubiquity. Ubiquity is basically THE coolest add-on ever created for Firefox. Nobody else has anything like it. It's a command-line for the browser (kind of like Quix, which came after it) but it's semantic and smart, and it shows you real-time results.
And now, it's basically dead. It's such a quiet death, that they won't even say it's "dead". Nobody even bothered updating the main Ubiquity page with this information -- I had to really dig to find it. It's kind of pathetic, really. The main Ubiquity page (which is very beautiful) says "Welcome to the new ubiquity blog!". This is from Aug 17, 2009. Has never been updated since.
I think that (a) it is a huge mistake to desert such an innovative project. No other browser has this, and it's literally way ahead of its time. And (b) if you go ahead and decide to ditch it (or "put it on the back burner" or whatever lame PR euphemism you come up with), at least be responsible about it, and let the world know properly! Update the main project page, for crying out loud!
This is the second groundbreaking project Raskin has had to desert. I have no idea why that is, and I guess he has his reasons (he's working on Firefox for Mobile, which is a much higher-profile product). I just have to say that for me, it's kind of sad to see such a product left to die. I thought I'd let the world know, in case there are other Ubiquity users around here who are wondering why things have been so quiet.
The Illusionist's Dream is a simple platformer; you play as a magician who needs to get through each level by transforming into any number of animals that you encounter along the way.
Each animal can do different things; the butterfly can obviously fly, but if it encounters a frog, the frog eats it, and you have to start over again. There's also a fox that runs fast and leaps far, but it eats any rabbits that cross its path. That means that, if you may need to be a rabbit later on, you need to take that into account ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Viki said 9:27AM on 2-20-2010
I currently use Ubiquity and find it quite useful. Lot of sites have made commands to work with Ubiquity and I use it regularly on sites I visit often.
Mozilla has a lot of talented developers, and its open source. If Raskin isnt able to maintain this wonderful addon, someone else should take over the development.
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hmm said 9:52AM on 2-20-2010
IYeah I agree. Somebody else would probably take over. No need to worry.
LouCypher said 2:23PM on 2-22-2010
Don't worry, it's not dead
http://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/2010/02/22/current-status-of-ubiquity/
Pickaxe said 10:02AM on 2-20-2010
I disagree with your praise of Ubiquity.
I'm reasonably efficient with command lines and terminals. I use FARR and Everything pretty much exclusively for my program launching and file managing.
And still in the few monthes I've used Ubiquity (I think it was about 2 years ago) I found it clunky, uncomfortable and lacking in the commands that I actually need. I had to type way too many letters to do simple commands.
Then again, it may have gotten better since. I doubt it though - I just don't think a command line interface for web surfing is such a good idea.
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sep332 said 3:31PM on 2-22-2010
It got a lot better with the new parser. And it doesn't have many commands built in, you should find some command feeds and subscribe to them.
Rohit Kapur said 10:01AM on 2-20-2010
I can't believe that it's dead. It just seems unbelievable that they'd desert it, especially after all the talk of integrating it into the browser at some point. It is *definitely* the most useful browser add-on today, and I can't imagine Firefox without it.
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stopsatgreen said 10:03AM on 2-20-2010
"Does this mean Ubiquity is dead? Not at all! It’s an open source project with a fairly large installed user base, and if you look at the Mercurial repository and the mailing list you can see that the community is still active fixing bugs and answering user’s questions."
http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/whats-up-with-ubiquity/
http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/quick-update-on-ubiquity-and-firefox-3-6/
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Erez Zukerman said 4:10PM on 2-20-2010
These posts are linked from within my post. That's why I said it's a marketing euphemism -- nobody has been updating the project page at all, so how can they say it's alive?
I get it that there are code commits -- but is anybody actually building and distributing the new version?
der_tuxman said 10:07AM on 2-20-2010
Dead? Bullshit. Check the Hg repository to see latest code commits.
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Erez Zukerman said 4:15PM on 2-20-2010
So... how can I get an updated version?
der_tuxman said 4:32PM on 2-20-2010
Build it from the repository. ;-) ... But I don't know if all of the code has been tested and fixed right now.
q said 12:37PM on 2-20-2010
@Erez Zukerman
"No other browser has this"
Actually, there is a port of Ubiquity for Opera here:
http://my.opera.com/cstrep/blog/index.dml/tag/ubiquity
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Erez Zukerman said 4:12PM on 2-20-2010
interesting! Does not seem trivial to install, though. However, I do see the guy is maintaining it -- last blog post about is it from Jan 24. That's actually better than what's on Ubiquity's main page -- kind of ironic.
q said 6:33PM on 2-20-2010
You're right. UserJS in Opera is not as easy as FF one-click add-ons installations but it's just a matter of creating a folder to store your files and pointing Opera to it. Then you just need to reload the page(s). No need to restart the browser.
Also, there's a Unite app that simplifies just that here:
http://unite.opera.com/application/401/
And here's an example to install WOT userjs manually:
http://extendopera.org/userjs/content/wot-opera
More of Ubiquity in Opera here:
http://people.opera.com/cosimo/ubiquity/help.html
Hope it helps.
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lars said 8:29PM on 2-20-2010
The Planet Ubiquity blog doesn't seem very dead either: http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/planet/
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haran_elessar said 11:06PM on 2-20-2010
I always thought that they had stopped development for the add-on because they were going to implement in into firefox as a built-in feature. Wasn't this gonna be part of Firefox 4.0?
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iofthestorm said 4:09AM on 2-21-2010
Yeah, it is.
iofthestorm said 4:10AM on 2-21-2010
Although I think the plan was to put in a simpler version of Ubiquity, not the whole thing. And the idea I believe was to have commands run from the address bar, not from a separate thing that pops up.
Tommes said 8:52AM on 2-21-2010
I'm really hoping this i the case. Do you have any links for a FF4 tech demo, demonstrating this functionality?
I think the command-line interface is very powerful, not only on the desktop, but especially in accessing the many services on the internets.
I use yubnub.org as my Keyword.URL in firefox, can really recommend it.
TurboFool said 1:30AM on 2-22-2010
If true, this is very disappointing. I use Ubiquity quite a bit on my computers and find it much faster than alternative options for accessing this type of information. I hope the other reports in the comments are more accurate.
And yes, I do recall this being planned initially as part of 3.5, I believe, then pushed to 4.0. Chrome arguably has something similar but much less advanced in its address bar, and that was the plan for Ubiquity. So I'm pretty sure they'll implement it just to keep up.
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