firefox ubiquity

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Firefox- Ubiquity


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.

• Though the work on it is on an indefinite hiatus, the ubiquity extension for Firefox is available for download.

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Factors which drove the project

• Linguistic Interfaces- the need to make the interface close enough to their natural language that people can understand how to use it.

• Task centric Web Browsing-the need to make the web task-ready rather than just a destination where one finds information


Technology

• Ubiquity commands are small chunks of Java scripts which can interface with web services.


Features

• Wikipedia- One can get all the wiki pages of information by just typing the search topic

• Map – one can get the Google map of his required destination to get the map right in front of his screen.

• Email – the email command uses Gmail for now. One can email to friends using this add-on

• Translate – Translates a phrase to any language you want.• The above four commands are some of the commands, you

can read more about them at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial


Current Status

• The project has been stopped as on Jan’2010 but Mozilla plans to revisit the project sometime in the future.

• They have Google group/mailing list which is useful for command development, feature suggestion, and other high level discussions

http://groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-firefox

http://groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-firefox