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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.
Comments
26
Subscribe to commentsVikiFeb 20th 2010 9:27AM
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.
hmmFeb 20th 2010 9:52AM
IYeah I agree. Somebody else would probably take over. No need to worry.
LouCypherFeb 22nd 2010 2:23PM
Don't worry, it's not dead
http://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/2010/02/22/current-status-of-ubiquity/
PickaxeFeb 20th 2010 10:02AM
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.
sep332Feb 22nd 2010 3:31PM
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 KapurFeb 20th 2010 10:01AM
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.
stopsatgreenFeb 20th 2010 10:03AM
"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/
Erez ZukermanFeb 20th 2010 4:10PM
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_tuxmanFeb 20th 2010 10:07AM
Dead? Bullshit. Check the Hg repository to see latest code commits.
Erez ZukermanFeb 20th 2010 4:15PM
So... how can I get an updated version?
der_tuxmanFeb 20th 2010 4:32PM
Build it from the repository. ;-) ... But I don't know if all of the code has been tested and fixed right now.
qFeb 20th 2010 12:37PM
@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
Erez ZukermanFeb 20th 2010 4:12PM
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.
qFeb 20th 2010 6:33PM
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.
larsFeb 20th 2010 8:29PM
The Planet Ubiquity blog doesn't seem very dead either: http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/planet/
haran_elessarFeb 20th 2010 11:06PM
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?
iofthestormFeb 21st 2010 4:09AM
Yeah, it is.
iofthestormFeb 21st 2010 4:10AM
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.
TommesFeb 21st 2010 8:52AM
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.
TurboFoolFeb 22nd 2010 1:30AM
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.