The developers are taking another route with Unity 8

Jun 11, 2015 12:42 GMT  ·  By

The search in Unity has been the source of serious debates in the past few years, but that should change dramatically with the new Unity 8, which no longer needs the current privacy tab that is available in the options.

We all remember the storm of disapproval that swept over the Linux community when Canonical announced that queries in Unity would also search online sources. The developers implemented an option in the security entry, the Settings panel, to help users disable that kind of online search. Now, Ubuntu devs are hard at work on Unity 8, the current desktop environment on Ubuntu Touch, and they have made some serious modifications.

Now that they had the chance of working with Unity from the ground up, they don't want to make the same mistake all over again, so they are implementing some options that give all users the power of choice to select and disable individual scopes.

The old security options in Unity 7 won't be necessary anymore

One of the problems with the online searches in Unity 7 is that the query needs to go through an intermediary server before it reaches its destination, and that is not the best solution possible. It's easy enough to disable those searches, but the developers need to do better.

"The scopes architecture in Unity 8 is quite different: there is no smart scope server involved in the search lifecycle. Instead, each query is only sent to the currently active scope (that is, the one that is currently visible), so that the user always knows where their search data ends up. For the case where the current scope being is aggregating multiple other scopes, its settings page will list all aggregated scopes, offering the possibility to individually disable each one if desired," wrote Pawel Stolowski on the Ubuntu Developer blog.

These security-related modifications will soon land in Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Next, but it will be a while until we see them on a stable desktop version based on Unity 8. In any case, it looks like Canonical won't make the same mistake twice.

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