Firefox browser goes Ubiquitous

by Tony Austin

Wednesday, 03 September 2008

Page 2 of 2

At this launch stage, the Ubiquity prototype "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."

You can read about Ubiquity in depth here. It describes the problem as being that the Web is disconnected, forcing you to go through multiple separate serial, non-integrated processes to accomplish tasks.

The Ubiquity team's goal is nothing less than "universal access" (a lofty goal indeed). "Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do."

They say:

We aren’t there yet. Instead, we have the rudimentary systems of structured natural language commands. You can select something and Ubiq “translate this to French”, or “email it to Jono”. In both cases, Ubiquity is smart enough to realize what “this” and “it” refers to, as well as knowing who Jono is (by talking with my web-mail’s contact list). It’s also smart enough to be able to understand commands like “map Chicago Comics” and “yelp Tapas near SF” and give you rich previews and search results to get you where you want to be quickly. Even better, both of those commands let you insert results directly into, say, an email you’re writing so that you never have to interrupt your chain of thought.

It's good to see that the team has no false modesty, admitting for example: "There’s a long way to go with this interface, though. We aren’t even prioritizing the command suggestions we give. The interface looks messy and is visually cluttered. We have made the ultimate faux pas of putting hyphens into what should be natural language commands. It’s hard to know what you can and can’t type."

And going on:

We found it difficult and time-consuming to write extensions to Firefox. There is something largely last-decade about requiring restarts to add a new feature to your browsing experience. It’s ironic that the entire Web is on a push model, yet the browser—the most fundamental tool of interacting with the Web—is on a pull model.

The fundamental problem is that extending the browser, and hence the web, is too difficult. The closer new browser functionality can be packaged to look like standard HTML and JS, the larger and more diverse a community will create it. The desktop paradigm for extension development, while powerful, has a high cost of adoption. Right now we have a short tail of browser functionality with thousands of add-ons. There should be millions. We can get to that long tail using a more web-like model for functionality development — tools that are accessible to hobbyists and tinkerers, but that scales to professionals.

This is rather heady stuff for those of us mere mortals who aren't into this sort of development, but nonetheless it's indicative of how dedicated people keep seeking out ways to deliver tools that resolve some of these issues.

Meanwhile, browser innovation continues elsewhere, and Google has taken its own fresh take on the browser ... You can read a review about Google Chrome browser beta here and download the Google Chrome beta version here. More about Chrome will follow from other iTWire writers very soon.

And all of this is free. Wonders will never cease!

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