Taskfox

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About Taskfox

Introduction

Taskfox is a project to uplift some of the things that were learnt from the Ubiquity project into a future version of Firefox. Its aim is to allow users to quickly access information and perform tasks that would normally take several steps to complete.

While the two projects share some common ideas and use cases, the goals are not all the same. Unlike Ubiquity, Taskfox is not a platform, is not intended to bring the user and the web together via language, and will not feature natural language processing. Also unlike Ubiquity, Taskfox will be part of the existing Firefox user interface, and will be localized to all locales that Firefox ships with.

Note: Taskfox is just a codename. Don't expect Firefox to ship using this name.

Background

Ubiquity

Over 200 thousand people are using Ubiquity daily, with hundreds of command authors, and thousands of commands in the wild. The Herd has seen over 1,200 unique command feeds submitted, many of which contain multiple commands. Commands have been written by the community, extension authors, and developers of websites and web services. The user tutorial is available in 10 languages, thanks to community contributions.

More information:

Rationale

While Ubiquity continues to be a successful experiment, its audience remains limited to people who:

are willing (and brave enough) to experiment with alternative, natural language keyboard style interfaces
use web applications extensively for email, calendaring, document editing, online collaboration and most of their day to day tasks
understand that the web is a collection of data which can be remixed, mashed together, and edited by users as well as by web developers
are familiar with Firefox Add-Ons and willing to install Ubiquity on all their machines
know at least some basic English

However, the underlying benefits that Ubiquity offers are far more universal. All internet users perform some set of tasks regularly - and many of these tasks require the same set of steps to be taken every time. The browser should facilitate accomplishing the end-goal and help reduce the number of steps to reach that goal whenever possible.

And that's where Taskfox comes in. The basic idea behind Taskfox is simple: take the time-saving ideas behind Ubiquity, and put them into Firefox. That means allowing users to quickly access information and perform tasks that would normally take several steps to complete. While the two projects share some common ideas and use cases, the goals are not all the same.

Code and downloads

Currently, Taskfox is in an incubator repository at https://hg.mozilla.org/incubator/taskfox/
No downloads available yet.

Get involved

IRC

Join #fx-team on irc.mozilla.org.

Mailing lists

General discussion takes place on the mozilla.dev.apps.firefox newsgroup. This is also accessible via the dev-apps-firefox mailing list and Google Groups.

Meetings

Weekly public meetings are held every Thursday at 3:00pm PDT (10:00pm UTC).

Anyone is free to attend:

+1 650 903 0800 x92 Conf# 8604 (US/International)
+1 416 848 3114 x92 Conf# 8604 (Canada)
+1 800 707 2533 (pin 369) Conf# 8604 (US Toll Free & Skype)

Issues to resolve

User Interactions & Workflows

The general user experience, and the interaction model are still being designed.

Localization

See the l10n page.

Contextual suggestions

Contextual suggestions are desirable, but only if they work correctly. This is comparable to Ubiquity's noun-first suggestions. Potentially, FireFox's microformats support could be leveraged for this. For some additional thoughts on this, see http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/new-tabs/

Required resources

Metrics on Ubiquity usage
- Specifically, which are the most popular verbs
Help from localizers
- See the l10n page
Many cups of coffee
- And cake