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Mozilla Releases Major Ubiquity Update

Ubiquity, the extension that adds command line functionality to the Firefox browser, got a major upgrade this week. Ubiquity 0.5 supports a bunch of new languages and drops the need to use hyphens in commands. The development team is also experimenting with "smart suggestions," a feature that lets Ubiquity make educated guesses about the meaning of unfamiliar data.

The good news is Ubiquity 0.5 adds nice features and updates to this handy tool. The bad news is that it breaks compatibility with third-party commands. That is sure to cause headaches and workflow problems for some of Ubiquity's 400,000 users. Fortunately, Mozilla has a plan.

"The solution we came up with was to take a page out of Mozilla's release management book. We need to get Ubiquity 0.5 out there because it really does make Ubiquity better and because it's the culmination of a whole lot of people's work -- but we can't break it. So our solution is this: We're going to release Ubiquity 0.5 alongside 0.1.9," says Mozilla's Aza Raskin.

Raskin says this method will provide a seamless transition to the upgrade since users can opt in when they're ready instead of dealing with an automatic update. He says it also gives developers a chance to migrate their third-party commands to version 0.5. Raskin likens the approach to the way Mozilla initially released Firefox 3 as opt in so users and developers could gradually get used its changes.

Ubiquity 0.5 requires Firefox 3.5 and is available for download right now. For a full list of changes visit the project's wiki page.
 

• firefox
• mozilla
• ubiquity

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