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What is Ubiquity?

Ubiquity was a Mozilla Labs experiment that was in development from 2008 to 2009. Its purpose was to explore whether a radically different type of interface to the Web — a task-centric, natural-language-based command line — could help us get common Web tasks done faster.

Development is currently on indefinite hiatus. We will most likely revisit the experiment at some point in the future. In the meantime, the Ubiquity extension for Firefox is still available for download (see below). Also, some of the ideas from Ubiquity are being implemented in Jetpack.

You can learn more about Ubiquity by reading Atul's blog post entitled Ubiquitous Interfaces, Ubiquitous Functionality, or try it out via the User Tutorial.

Other informative blog posts about Ubiquity include:

Trusting Functionality by Atul
Mouse-Based Ubiquity
Sharing Streamable Functionality by Aza
Language-Based Interfaces, part 1: The Problem by Jono
Our Presentation at Labs Night by Jono
Why Verbs? by Jono
Selected Press

Install

For Firefox 14.0 and up

Install Ubiquity 0.6.2 for Firefox 14 and up

Install the latest beta of Ubiquity - Maintained by community member Satyr

For Older Versions of Firefox

Install latest version of Ubiquity for Firefox 3.5

Install the latest beta of Ubiquity for Firefox 3.5

Install older versions (if the current version is breaking for you)

Participation

General Google Group/mailing list - Useful for discussion of command development, user interface, feature suggestions, and other high-level discussions.
Core Google Group/mailing list - Discussion of low-level internals of Ubiquity.
Get Satisfaction - Ideas, Complaints, Forum, and "Customer Service"
#ubiquity irc.mozilla.org - Live internet relay chat discussion.
Good-for-beginners bugs - bug tickets which may be good for a Ubiquity beginner to attack
Frequently Encountered Bugs - bugs that get reported a lot on the mailing list and Get Satisfaction that would make lots of people happy if they got fixed
Commands In The Wild Add links to your commands here.
Issue Tracker - Used to report/discuss bugs and submit patches for Ubiquity.
Trac Components and Keywords - Keywords and categories to use when filing Trac tickets.
Ubiquity HG Repository - The Mercurial source code repository for Ubiquity.
Buildbot - Continuous integration that runs Ubiquity unit tests after every commit. If the tests fail, they're reported immediately to the mailing list.
Credits

Meetings

Meeting notes & times

Documentation

Ubiquity User Tutorial
The latest Command Authoring Tutorial (for command authors using a Ubiquity source checkout); or the frozen Ubiquity 0.5 Command Authoring Tutorial for those using version 0.5 of the extension.
Command Update Tutorial for how to take a command written for Ubiquity 0.1 and make it work in Ubiquity 0.5.
Locked-Down Feed Tutorial
Secure Coding Practices
Skinning Ubiquity Tutorial
Ubiquity Code Documentation - Generated from the latest source code via Code Illuminated.
Contributing to Core Development
Localizing Ubiquity to Your Language
Localizing Commands to Your Language
Noun-types Reference
Bundled libraries
Using jQuery in Ubiquity
JavaScript style guide
Ubiquity 0.1.3 Architecture
Labs/Ubiquity/Parser_Documentation
Labs/Ubiquity/Parser_Interface
Help Document the 0.5 code here - working copies of the wiki documentation for the latest source version
Help us improve the built-in command documentation by editing this page
Help us improve the interactive tutorial by editing this page

Blogs

Planet Ubiquity
Aza
Atul
Rey
Jono
Abi
Zach
mitcho (see also his future topics to blog on)
cers

Twitter

@mozillaubiquity: The main source of news & info about the Ubiquity project via Twitter. Be sure to follow.
@azaaza: Mozilla's co-lead developer for the Ubiquity project
@toolness: Mozilla's co-lead developer for the Ubiquity project
@reybango: Evangelist for the Ubiquity project
@theunfocused: Fellow Mozillian Blair McBride
@_abi_: Created the Devo Firefox extension which provided a keyboard command launcher similar to what Ubiquity is today.
@fernando_takai: Major supporter of Ubiquity.
@mitchoyoshitaka: Resident linguist
@bpung: Mozilla labs intern, developer for Ubiquity
@ChristianSonne: Developer for Ubiquity

The Herd

The Herd keeps track of all Ubiquity scripts. For more information, see the following links:

Herd HG Repository
Herd Developer FAQ
CouchDB - database used for Herd
The Herd-The Herd Itself.

Proposals

Ubiquity Roadmap - from 0.5 to 1.0
Command Suggestions - use this page to suggest new Ubiquity commands you'd like to see.
Proposals for New Nouns
Proposals for new "Magic Words"
Ubiquity Commands Center - an idea for a web-panel that maintains a database of Ubiquity scripts.
Ubiquity Trust Network - a proposal for a distributed trust network
Ubiquity In Thunderbird - let's make Ubiquity work in Thunderbird!
0.2 Roadmap Proposals - Brainstorming on possible directions to go for Ubiquity 0.2.
0.2 Design: UI and Security Extensibility - Design-related thoughts on how to make Ubiquity extensible in regards to security/command-execution and access by other Firefox UIs.
Proposed commands for uplift into Ubiquity 0.2
Writing commands with semantic roles - would enable commands to be automagically localized
The Great Renaming -- proposal for renaming all built-in commands for consistency and to work with the Overlord Verbs system.

Internationalization and Localization

internationalization and localization pages
Ubiquity i18n Google Group/mailing list for discussion of internationalization and localization topics
Command Localization Tutorial for how to translate commands to your language

Labs/Ubiquity

Contents