Ubiquity, a
legacy extension for
Mozilla Firefox, 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 interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...
-like interface that was based on
natural language commands. These commands were supplied both by
Mozilla
Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...
and by individual users. Commands were written in
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
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 (pro ...
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.
After development of Ubiquity was ceased by Mozilla, a community-maintained version was actively developed until 2016.
[https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity/downloads ]
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 is a browser based application for macro recording, editing and playback for web automation and testing. It is provided as a standalone application and extensions for the Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer web browsers. ...
*
EMML
EMML, or Enterprise Mashup Markup Language, is an XML markup language for creating enterprise mashups, which are software applications that consume and mash data from variety of sources, often performing logical or mathematical operations as well ...
*
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