Back to Labs/Ubiquity.

Main Features

Locked-Down Feeds

Ubiquity 0.1.7 offers users a new way to access untrusted functionality called Locked-Down Feeds. A Locked-Down Feed is much like a regular feed, with the exception that it's run in a very restricted sandbox environment that severely mitigates any kind of damage that it can do to your computer. Not only will this make it easier for users to try out new command feeds, but it will also make it easier for command authors to rest assured that their commands won't accidentally do harm to their users' data.

For information on how to write locked-down feeds, check out our Locked-Down Feed Tutorial.

Bug Reporting

Ubiquity 0.1.7 now has a full-fledged report-bug command, which Atul has blogged about in his post Automatic Bug Reporting for Firefox Extensions. If you have problems with Ubiquity, please feel free to contribute a bug report to the public domain using this command.

Security Improvements

Aside from Locked-Down Feeds, this version of Ubiquity offers a host of security improvements, from bug-fixes to enhancements that make it easier to write commands that don't inadvertently create vulnerabilities.

Download It

If you already have Ubiquity, it will automatically update itself soon (you can also go to the add-ons manager and click "Find Updates" if you are feeling impatient). If you don't already have Ubiquity installed, you can get the latest version of Ubiquity here.

Thanks

Thanks to the Ubiquity core team for all their hard work on this release!

In Depth

The complete list of fixes for this release can be viewed at the Ubiquity 0.1.7 Milestone.

General

• A number of stability fixes have been made, particularly in regards to command feed subscriptions.

• It's now easier to view the source code of command feeds. (#569)

• Ubiquity is now compatible with a wider variety of Firefox releases. (#581)

• Ubiquity previews now work a little more smoothly on Windows. (#561)

• An ancient Linux transparency bug has been fixed. [1]

• A number of memory leaks have been fixed, but some still remain. This means that, for the time being, users of Ubiquity may experience Firefox slowing down after periods of extended use. We're really sorry about this and are making it a priority to fix these for Ubiquity's next release. The workaround for now is to restart your browser whenever it seems to slow down.

Standard Feeds

• The wikipedia command now supports "simple english" as a language type, so it's possible to e.g. "wiki salad in simple". (#614)

• The twitter command no longer hangs Firefox on OS X due to an invisible authorization dialog (#470).

• The rypple command has been added.

For Command Authors

• The Ubiquity Code Documentation has been significantly improved.

• If you're a fan of regular expressions, as of Ubiquity 0.1.7 you can just put a regular expression in place of a noun type object when specifying the takes option in CmdUtils.CreateCommand(), and Ubiquity will take care of the rest. Make sure you specify the regular expression as either a regular expression literal or a RegExp object. (#342)

• jQuery has been upgraded to 1.3.2. (#588)

• A new function, Utils.urlToParams(), has been added which takes the given url and returns an Object containing keys and values retrieved from its query-part. For more information, see the documentation for Utils.

• CmdUtils.makeSearchCommand() has been rewritten from scratch, is less buggy, and supports more options. For extensive documentation and examples, see the documentation for CmdUtils.

• The preview area for commands is no longer chrome privileged; instead, it's now a XUL browser element of type content whose URL initially points to a data: URI, but can be changed via a new option to CmdUtils.CreateCommand() called previewUrl. For more information, see the documentation for CmdUtils.

For Skin Authors

• The DOM structure of the command window has changed because the preview area for commands is no longer chrome-privileged (see above). Because of this, the CSS for skins needs to change, and skins for previous versions of Ubiquity probably won't work very well with 0.1.7. The Skinning Tutorial has changed to reflect these alterations. (#612)

0.1.7.1 Hotfix

On March 25, 2009, a 0.1.7.1 hotfix was issued that added the VideoSurf command and set it as the default video search command. This hotfix also moved Ubiquity's main XPI hosting server from ubiquity.mozilla.com to addons.mozilla.org.