Introducing Ubiquity
An experiment into connecting the Web with language.

It Doesn’t Have to be This Way
You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.
This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.
It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.
Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time.
Enter Ubiquity
Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.
The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
Extend the browser functionality easily.
Learn more about Ubiquity and the capabilities that it could provide for users and developers.
The Initial Prototype
As part of this announcement, we’re also releasing an early experimental prototype to demonstrate some of the concepts of Ubiquity and the possibilities that it opens up. This release is meant as a illustration of a concept and mainly focuses on the platform. The next release will explore interfaces that are closer to features that might make it into Firefox.
Install the prototype and you’ll be presented with a tutorial to get you started.
Ubiquity 0.1
Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
Read about Ubiquity In Depth, or see a number of the commands in action (with screenshots) in the Ubiquity Tutorial.
All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the the GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license.
This is the goal of what kinds of language-based services Ubiquity hopes to inspire people to create:
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This is a screenshot of Ubiquity’s current map functionality:
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Influences, References, and Background Resources
Enso by Humanized
Trust-based security, and Herd-based knowledge by Atul Varma
For a full list, see the credits page.
Get Involved
Mozilla Labs is a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit. The Ubiquity experiment is still in its infancy and just getting started. There are many ways to join the team and get involved:
Report a Bug Discuss Ubiquity
View Source
We’ve also started compiling a suggestion list for possible Ubiquity commands. If you have any suggestions, add them here or get inspired and develop one of them and add them to the command repository.
I’m sure that I’m not the only one, before noticing it was coming from Planet Mozilla, thought:
“What does maps have to do with Ubuntu’s graphical installer?”