Ubiquity Extension

Ubiquity, a legacy browser extension for Mozilla Firefox, was a collection of quick and easy natural-language-derived commands that act as mashups of web services, thus allowing users to get information and relate it to current and other webpages. It also allowed Web users to create new commands without requiring much technical background. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity

Aug26'2008: prototype introduced

2009 post by Jef's son Aza Raskin, then at Mozilla building the Ubiquity browser extension (coming from Enso). You can think about it as a pragmatic stepping stone to the universal canvas of the Cat, with the web as the platform. The goal is to finally switch the way the world thinks about computing, from page/application centric to task centric. If we succeed, then I think we've together accomplished the goal of implementing a large part of Jef's vision.... Our new project attempts to alleviate all of these problems by allowing end-users to apply textual commands, or verbs, to whatever they’re looking at.

• After development of Ubiquity was ceased by Mozilla, a community-maintained version was actively developed until 2016
• (2010-01-20) Xia Retrospective What We Learned From Ubiquity
• rostok/UbiChr https://github.com/rostok/ubichr (for Google Chrome)
• GChristensen github with: almost all codebase of the original ubiquity became not functional in the new Firefox Quantum. The first attempts to resurrect Ubiquity came from the users of Opera browser (ubiquity-opera) and continued on Google Chrome (UbiChr). But they lacked the natural language parser which gave Ubiquity all its superpowers. I have taken UbiChr, ported the NL-parser from the Ubiquity by satyr to ES6, borrowed the API from original Ubiquity, combined them, added bells and whistles, and the fully-functional new Ubiquity went back to Firefox. This means that it is possible to port any "legacy" commands (that are still compatible with WebExtension APIs) to Firefox Quantum with minimal changes. The new iShell project goes beyond this, providing the brand-new command authoring APIs, based on the modern language features, that have not existed when the original Ubiquity was created.
  • https://gchristensen.github.io/ishell/ iShell is a WebExtensions revival of Mozilla Ubiquity, an ingenious experiment in linguistic user interfaces. It aims to bring back the full functionality of Ubiquity to Firefox Quantum and provide a clean, unified modern object-oriented command authoring API.