10 ms·

WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

489 points by codepo8-hn 12y ago

makmanalp 12y ago
It's crazy how history repeats itself ... This reminds me of Mozilla Composer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Composer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Composer) back when the Mozilla Suite was still a thing and Firefox was in its infancy!
- codepo8-hn 12y ago
  Not really comparable. Composer was a WYSIWYG editor for web pages; the WebIDE is an editor, but more importantly it manages the packaging and creation of manifest files of apps for you. I started with Composer and the output was so awful that I learned HTML instead. This doesn't hide any code from you or generates things you don't want. The templates of the apps are maintained by the community on GitHub.
Deutscher 12y ago
I've always wondered why developer tools are bundled with browsers. Shouldn't they be available as separate downloads as: 1. Most people use browsers compared to working with them for development, and 2. The additional tools just add to the package size and possibly increased resource usage (if they are running with the rest of the browser)? Thanks in advance for the replies.
- gress 12y ago
  It's true that most people use browsers as opposed to working with them for development. The question is, do you want this state of affairs to be built into the design of our systems, or do you think that it would be good if, over time, a greater proportion of people are able to express themselves through code?
- josso 12y ago
  Regarding #2: The developer tools don't run unless they're opened, so that shouldn't affect any normal users.
  - lighthazard 12y ago
    Doesn't that still add to the package size?
    - valarauca1 12y ago
      Yes. Bandwidth and additional HDD space are used. But web browsers data footprint is small. Installed FireFox consumes ~68.1MB of disk space. Which is microscopic in the days of TB Hard Drives.
  - hmsimha 12y ago
    Although every now and then a 'normal user' might get an unexpected surprise when they accidentally open them. Reminds me of this http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tkld5/my_facebook_suddenly_split_in_half/ http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tkld5/my_facebook_s...
- eumenides1 12y ago
  I agree. I feel like mozilla is going back to it's roots of a multifaceted beast. This should be a plugin like firebug.
- campd 12y ago
  Resource usage of devtools that aren't running is near zero (there's a tiny bit of overhead to manage the menu items to launch it). Download size is affected, although for larger parts of the developer tools (things like firefox OS simulators and adb) we use addons. We think that tradeoff is worth the benefits - users can look under the hood (even if most of them won't), developers have quick and easy access to tools, and we don't have to worry about things like version mismatch/testing concerns/etc.
- khc 12y ago
  I imagine it's in the same spirit as including "View Source", so that ordinary users are empowered to figure out how a website works, should they want to.
- codepo8-hn 12y ago
  1) The idea of the web is that the boundary between consumer and creator is very blurred. It is a world-wide, distributed environment. Making the tool you consume also the tool to create empowers a lot of people. Consider yourself a budding publisher on a very bad connection in an emerging country: you download a browser to surf the web, and that one now also enables you to create something for it. Downloading xCode or Android Studio would take ages. For developers, this is also an advantage: you use the same browser your end users have. In the past developer add-ons interfered with the rendering of the page and the performance of the browser. This gave you false results. 2) Whilst devtools make any browser bigger in initial file size (including Chrome and IE), it is not a large part of the main download (fonts are actually a huge one). The performance hit is to the overall computation (much like a standalone tool would) but isn't impeding on the browser performance itself.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- shadowfiend 12y ago
  Should/shouldn't is hard to say. But the fact that they are bundled with browsers is absolutely amazing, not for the professional developer, but for the amateur. The fact that you can start messing with a website with almost no additional effort and with no additional software is amazing. IMO, it's what makes the web one of the environments with the least friction to start programming in. Visible results, full-featured programming (via JS), and readily available tools. Once you start getting into complex frameworks and what have you, you start needing additional tooling, more knowledge, etc, but that's fine. The point is to start tinkering, you only need a browser. To start doing a little more than tinkering, you need a browser and a text editor (not like Sublime, like Notepad; on day 0 you don't care that much about syntax highlighting). Both of these come out-of-the-box on any computer.
- snarfy 12y ago
  I'd rather have features than have them removed. Considering the dynamic nature, jitting, etc, most of the runtime needed for development is already there. Might as well throw a UI on it.
- jaredmcateer 12y ago
  I don't think Mozilla cares about the file size anymore. 10 years ago they cared about the file size of Firefox, the mandate was that it could not be greater than ~5mb, the stable download is now almost 6 times that size.
  - thefreeman 12y ago
    luckily, my internet speed has increased about 1500x since then, so I don't even notice :)
  - angersock 12y ago
    The web 10 years ago was a great deal simpler than it is today (and that's kind of insane that we can say that).
  - asadotzler 12y ago
    That wasn't a mandate. It was my proposal so I know. I suggested that we target "about the size of an MP3" because that was the most common unit of download that a lot of people understood in the early 2000s and downloading software was something people weren't terribly comfortable with. I did some quick estimates and came up with 4MB as the goal based on the size of popular MP3s. By the time we shipped Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, we managed to get the download to about 4.7MB. That was 2004 though. Today the Web is a lot more capable because browsers are a lot more capable. Also, typical download bandwidth for consumers is a lot more capable than it was in 2004. Most of the growth in Firefox download size since then is a result of Gecko/Web platform feature growth, not the GUI features that users interact with. That web platform capability isn't free. It takes code to make JS dozens of times faster than it was in 2004. It takes code to add HTML5 and CSS 3 features, WebGL, WebRTC, and all of the other great stuff the Web platform includes today. That code makes the download larger. That being said, I'd love to see another round of evaluation to see what can be trimmed or slimmed. I don't consider that the same priority it was in 2004 though.
- ZoFreX 12y ago
  Cautionary tale: They were bundled separately for Internet Explorer, and everyone assumed they didn't exist. Even now you can see people complaining that say, "developing for IE 6 was hard because it didn't have developer tools".
  - chippy 12y ago
    I think most of the developers I knew were saying "because it didn't have any good developer tools"
- asadotzler 12y ago
  View source, the original developer tool, is why the Web is so generative and has been for two decades, IMO. Today's developer tools are just an extension of that ancient view source capability. The web is not like other platforms where there's a hard line between people who make it and people who use it. Many people, like myself, thought of themselves as users until the web's view source made it possible for us to become content producers with no significant additional tooling. Today, the Web is a lot more complex a platform than it was in the early 90s and so our view source and JS consoles have evolved into more capable developer tools as a result.
- mikeratcliffe 12y ago
  Our devtools have unit tests that run for every tiny change that is made to Firefox. Building the tools in gives much more stability. We are also using and exposing a lot of low level Firefox stuff and fixing bugs as a result. So in short you get a better, more extensible browser, more stability and the chance to take a look at how something you use every day works. It's a win-win in my opinion.
fidotron 12y ago
Is this itself entirely a webapp? As an aside, I'm amazed the way Mozilla have co-opted the term "Web" to mean whatever they want it to. The way they've branded all sorts of non-standard APIs in FFOS "Web" APIs to confuse people into thinking these are somehow more open than anything else is impressive.
- rimantas 12y ago
  Mozilla lost their focus long ago. They are now mostly political organisation with side busines of making software and financed by a competitor. I loved them so much since the days of the Phoenix (I think it was 0.6 which I made my default browser), I admired Blake Ross. They had a great goal: to make the best browser. Now? I couldn't care less. I don't know who the leader is, or do they even have one. I know they are good I writing manifestos and have some evangelists not too shy to lie. Will those political games help anyone? I doubt so. But if once great organisation is determined to become irrelevant, how can you forbid that? MDN is good, though.
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    Mozilla is not Apple, they can very much function without a leader. They have the ONLY fully featured modern browser that is also free software. IMHO, it fits the "make the best browser" philosophy.
- blueveek 12y ago
  > Is this itself entirely a webapp? Actually, yes: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtools/app-manager http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtoo...
  - fidotron 12y ago
    XUL is a web technology now? That's my point. It's not. EDIT: ici: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtools/app-manager/content/index.xul http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtoo...
thegeomaster 12y ago
This should be a separate tool. An add-on, or whatever, but it shouldn't be bundled with the browser. If you think about it, it doesn't make much sense. Do you see audio mixing/mastering or video editing software being bundled with media players? Or do you see word processors/TeX IDEs bundled with PDF viewers? No, because you wanted to play your Black Sabbath .mp3, or read a .pdf scientific paper. If you wanted to record your Black Sabbath tribute band and produce the recording, you'd get a digital audio workstation. If you wanted to write your own scientific paper, you'd get a TeX bundle. If you wanted to develop web apps, you'd want to download an IDE. Not use a web browser. A vast, vast majority of people downloading Firefox wants to just look at damn web pages. The ones who want to make them are welcome to get dedicated software. Developers of that separate program for web dev could then go crazy and add a lot of features that wouldn't be possible so easily if it was bundled in a browser. Everyone wins. So why this? No one is being done a favor by bundling a web IDE with a browser. A bullshit token reason like "it's easier for novices" will not qualify.
- applecore 12y ago
  The democratization of the web gives people who have been consumers the ability to be creators. The tools of creation belong in everyone's hands.
  - nfoz 12y ago
    Yes but they don't all need to be exactly a single tool, a single process! Just like I really don't want a web browser in my file manager / operating system / text editor.... wait all of that already happened. sigh.
  - sigzero 12y ago
    And? That doesn't mean it cannot be a plugin.
    - asadotzler 12y ago
      If view source had been a developer plug-in in the 90's, I'll bet there would be a lot fewer web developers today.
binarymax 12y ago
Always glad to see more things happening in this space, but most devs already BYOIDE and would probably just like better integration with their existing tools: http://remotedebug.org/ http://remotedebug.org/
- campd 12y ago
  Integration with external editors/IDEs is a very important part of this project. A lot of what WebIDE brings to the party on top of normal editing is device/simulator management as well as the usual Developer Tools inspection and debugging. So there are three layers of compatibility we expect to see with external IDEs: 0) No integration - Open a WebIDE window with editing turned off and use it (or command line tools that drive it) to manage device connections/pushing/etc. 1) Simple integration - Most of the basic device connection management will be available through command line tools, it should be incredibly easy to drive that through editor/IDE configuration. 2) The whole nine yards: Speak a remote debugging protocol and get full control over the debuggee. As far as the whole nine yards, you can either use remotedebug's protocol and proxies (although development seems to have trailed off there?), speak each browser's protocol natively, or maybe down the road the protocol abstraction we're working on at Mozilla.
kibwen 12y ago
> We’re working on a protocol adapter that will allow > clients using the Firefox Remote Debugging Protocol – > including the Developer Tools and WebIDE – talk to all > mobile browsers, regardless of rendering engine or > runtime. Our first targets are Chrome for Android and > Safari on iOS. My company expects all of our internal web applications to function on the executives' iPads, but they refuse to purchase Macs on which to debug issues that manifest only on mobile Safari. And since the mobile Safari developer console was disabled in iOS 6, I haven't come up with anything better than alert-based debugging techniques (Firebug Lite was broken the last time that I tried, though admittedly that was a while ago). If Mozilla truly reverse-engineers Apple's remote debugging protocol it would be a godsend for us. (And if I'm just an idiot who's overlooking some simple way of debugging mobile Safari, please let me know.)
- 27182818284 12y ago
  The sad answer is that your co' is what is incorrect. If you have "executives" plural you have the budget in your organization to buy a dev mac and a dev device.
  - kibwen 12y ago
    I agree that they're being foolish (though hey, they're the ones paying me to waste my time), but I'm just as peeved at Apple for removing a perfectly-workable self-contained solution in favor of yet more platform lock-in.
    - JohnTHaller 12y ago
      > but I'm just as peeved at Apple for removing a perfectly-workable self-contained solution in favor of yet more platform lock-in. Peeved, but not surprised, given their track record.
- colinramsay 12y ago
  I've never tried it, but how about this? http://developer.telerik.com/featured/a-concise-guide-to-remote-debugging-on-ios-android-and-windows-phone/#weinre http://developer.telerik.com/featured/a-concise-guide-to-rem... Or, run OSX in a Windows virtual machine? You could us Safari remote debugging then.
BaconJuice 12y ago
Anyone know how I can access this on Windows XP? Don't seem to see the option to click "Web IDE" on Developer tools?
- jryans 12y ago
  The menu option is still named "App Manager" in today's Nightly. It will be renamed to WebIDE in tomorrow's build.
- codepo8-hn 12y ago
  App Manager. The label will be renamed in tomorrow's Nightly/
- kwierso 12y ago
  You need to enable it by flipping devtools.webide.enabled to true in about:config first.
- 01Michael10 12y ago
  You have bigger problems then how to run "Web IDE"... Why are you running Firefox nighties on Windows XP? You trying to have the most unstable and insecure box possible?
edwinnathaniel 12y ago
Developing a moderately complicated plugins on Firefox and Chrome is a major PITA currently (not to mention that JavaScript is... somewhat moderately PITA to deal with as well). I just wish that these vendors behind web browsers would put more effort on cleaning up their acts on the plugins development as well (stable and useful docs, tutorials, more tutorials, and mooooreee tutorials, sane development environment without jumping through hoops, better integration with IDEs and whatnot), not just building infrastructure upon infrastructure in which the development and deployment to the said infrastructure is PITA.
simonsarris 12y ago
This is fantastic and I'm really glad it's being bundled with Firefox and not as a separate download. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of kids still assume that programming is essentially "magic" done by professionals and they implicitly assume there is no way to getting started at their education level (This is especially true if their parents are non-technical, as mine were). All the resources in the world may exist, but they may not be obvious unless you look for them. When I was a kid I assumed that programmers were all professionals with a billion years of training and their own special equipment. Today I know the only difference between a programmer and a yet-to-be-programmer kid are bigger feet and a coffee addiction, the computers are the very same. But I didn't know that back then - I wish someone told me. I think it is extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?" Putting an IDE inside the browser, having no other dependencies between viewing web-pages and making web-pages is an incredible first step. I await the day any kid asks "How do I make my own webpages?" and we can answer "You've already got everything you need, just press F12." There's an art to making seemingly insurmountable things appear doable, like becoming a programmer if you have no programmer role models, and I think we should give it more attention. The web makes it easier than ever, and while a bundled IDE isn't going to be the Geocities or Bob Ross equivalent, it's definitely the next step in reducing the friction of getting started. Bravo, Firefox team.
- super_mario 12y ago
  What? Kids ARE the experts and if you have spent time to become a professional you are already too old. Haven't you read the agism article on HN today?
- cbhl 12y ago
  > the computers are the very same. What do you do when you run into a kid holding an iPad?
  - cclogg 12y ago
    An iPad could be a good stepping stone. For me it was Nintendo as a kid that then got me into computer games, which then got me into making my own stuff, which then made me into a programmer today heh.
zo1 12y ago
It's neat and all, but please Mozilla, don't include this with Firefox. At the very least, have a separate lean-version that doesn't have this "fluff" included. And a developer/power-user version that includes it. I understand that web-app development is big, and it's the "new-desktop", but that doesn't mean that this awesome browser should include everything and the kitchen sink.
- robin_reala 12y ago
  If it’s anything like the existing developer tools it’ll be fairly hidden and lazy-loaded when needed. I wouldn’t worry too much.
chippy 12y ago
Netscape had an editor way back when also.
agentultra 12y ago
This is amazing work. I hope it continues to go even further. I'd like to see a browser that is really just implemented on top of a kernel with full programmatic access to everything from the top down: just as Emacs happens to be a text editor built on the elisp kernel, Firefox could happen to be a browser built on a web kernel. Everything that drives the UI are just functions that could just as easily be invoked from the scratch pad. If you know a bit of javascript you can write a few of your own functions to automate some common browsing tasks. And if you need even more functionality you can dig deeper and write your own libraries that seamlessly integrate into the kernel without a hitch and can be invoked from your own menus. No plugin tom-foolery or artificial walls around the garden. Looking forward to seeing how this develops!
- past 12y ago
  You are pretty much describing the Firefox architecture. We are invoking Firefox UI code from scratchpad all the time when prototyping things. Some parts of the UI do not use standard Web APIs (e.g. XUL and XBL), as there are different opinions on how the web platform should evolve to fulfill those needs, but if you include all the experimental technologies to this web kernel, we are already there.
z3t4 12y ago
It makes sense so ship an editor with a reader. So that you can communicate both ways, both create and consume. Now we only need a way to share!
mongrol 12y ago
Looking forward to the new Pheonix when someone gets fed up enough with the current heavyweight Firefox to write it.
- asadotzler 12y ago
  The challenge here is that Gecko is the heavyweight bit here, not Firefox. If you wanted to shrink the size of Firefox dramatically, you could not do so without removing Web functionality (as opposed to Firefox functionality.) I'd love to see someone give that a shot. It was really three or four people who "Firefoxed" the old Mozilla Suite and there's nothing stopping some similarly motivated group from giving it a go. Still, I don't think they'd get nearly as far as we did back in 2002 and 2003, because Firefox is actually very trim and fit. There aren't a lot of extra features to cut and the code implementing most features is smart enough not to waste resources when not in use.
dingdingdang 12y ago
Holy shit that's cool! Makes me want to get a FF phone.. just about now!
dschulz 12y ago
Yay! Can't wait to download an even bigger package to update my browser.. now with plenty of features I don't need. Looking forward to the {emacs,Lua,Perl}-embedded-Firefox!
niutech 12y ago
Google is working on an IDE inside Chrome, too. It's called Spark: https://github.com/dart-lang/spark https://github.com/dart-lang/spark

489 points by codepo8-hn 12y ago

It's crazy how history repeats itself ... This reminds me of Mozilla Composer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Composer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Composer) back when the Mozilla Suite was still a thing and Firefox was in its infancy!

codepo8-hn 12y ago
Not really comparable. Composer was a WYSIWYG editor for web pages; the WebIDE is an editor, but more importantly it manages the packaging and creation of manifest files of apps for you. I started with Composer and the output was so awful that I learned HTML instead. This doesn't hide any code from you or generates things you don't want. The templates of the apps are maintained by the community on GitHub.

Deutscher 12y ago

I've always wondered why developer tools are bundled with browsers. Shouldn't they be available as separate downloads as: 1. Most people use browsers compared to working with them for development, and 2. The additional tools just add to the package size and possibly increased resource usage (if they are running with the rest of the browser)? Thanks in advance for the replies.

gress 12y ago
It's true that most people use browsers as opposed to working with them for development. The question is, do you want this state of affairs to be built into the design of our systems, or do you think that it would be good if, over time, a greater proportion of people are able to express themselves through code?
josso 12y ago
Regarding #2: The developer tools don't run unless they're opened, so that shouldn't affect any normal users.
- lighthazard 12y ago
  Doesn't that still add to the package size?
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    Yes. Bandwidth and additional HDD space are used. But web browsers data footprint is small. Installed FireFox consumes ~68.1MB of disk space. Which is microscopic in the days of TB Hard Drives.
- hmsimha 12y ago
  Although every now and then a 'normal user' might get an unexpected surprise when they accidentally open them. Reminds me of this http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tkld5/my_facebook_suddenly_split_in_half/ http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tkld5/my_facebook_s...
eumenides1 12y ago
I agree. I feel like mozilla is going back to it's roots of a multifaceted beast. This should be a plugin like firebug.
campd 12y ago
Resource usage of devtools that aren't running is near zero (there's a tiny bit of overhead to manage the menu items to launch it). Download size is affected, although for larger parts of the developer tools (things like firefox OS simulators and adb) we use addons. We think that tradeoff is worth the benefits - users can look under the hood (even if most of them won't), developers have quick and easy access to tools, and we don't have to worry about things like version mismatch/testing concerns/etc.
khc 12y ago
I imagine it's in the same spirit as including "View Source", so that ordinary users are empowered to figure out how a website works, should they want to.
codepo8-hn 12y ago
1) The idea of the web is that the boundary between consumer and creator is very blurred. It is a world-wide, distributed environment. Making the tool you consume also the tool to create empowers a lot of people. Consider yourself a budding publisher on a very bad connection in an emerging country: you download a browser to surf the web, and that one now also enables you to create something for it. Downloading xCode or Android Studio would take ages. For developers, this is also an advantage: you use the same browser your end users have. In the past developer add-ons interfered with the rendering of the page and the performance of the browser. This gave you false results. 2) Whilst devtools make any browser bigger in initial file size (including Chrome and IE), it is not a large part of the main download (fonts are actually a huge one). The performance hit is to the overall computation (much like a standalone tool would) but isn't impeding on the browser performance itself.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
shadowfiend 12y ago
Should/shouldn't is hard to say. But the fact that they are bundled with browsers is absolutely amazing, not for the professional developer, but for the amateur. The fact that you can start messing with a website with almost no additional effort and with no additional software is amazing. IMO, it's what makes the web one of the environments with the least friction to start programming in. Visible results, full-featured programming (via JS), and readily available tools. Once you start getting into complex frameworks and what have you, you start needing additional tooling, more knowledge, etc, but that's fine. The point is to start tinkering, you only need a browser. To start doing a little more than tinkering, you need a browser and a text editor (not like Sublime, like Notepad; on day 0 you don't care that much about syntax highlighting). Both of these come out-of-the-box on any computer.
snarfy 12y ago
I'd rather have features than have them removed. Considering the dynamic nature, jitting, etc, most of the runtime needed for development is already there. Might as well throw a UI on it.
jaredmcateer 12y ago
I don't think Mozilla cares about the file size anymore. 10 years ago they cared about the file size of Firefox, the mandate was that it could not be greater than ~5mb, the stable download is now almost 6 times that size.
- thefreeman 12y ago
  luckily, my internet speed has increased about 1500x since then, so I don't even notice :)
- angersock 12y ago
  The web 10 years ago was a great deal simpler than it is today (and that's kind of insane that we can say that).
- asadotzler 12y ago
  That wasn't a mandate. It was my proposal so I know. I suggested that we target "about the size of an MP3" because that was the most common unit of download that a lot of people understood in the early 2000s and downloading software was something people weren't terribly comfortable with. I did some quick estimates and came up with 4MB as the goal based on the size of popular MP3s. By the time we shipped Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, we managed to get the download to about 4.7MB. That was 2004 though. Today the Web is a lot more capable because browsers are a lot more capable. Also, typical download bandwidth for consumers is a lot more capable than it was in 2004. Most of the growth in Firefox download size since then is a result of Gecko/Web platform feature growth, not the GUI features that users interact with. That web platform capability isn't free. It takes code to make JS dozens of times faster than it was in 2004. It takes code to add HTML5 and CSS 3 features, WebGL, WebRTC, and all of the other great stuff the Web platform includes today. That code makes the download larger. That being said, I'd love to see another round of evaluation to see what can be trimmed or slimmed. I don't consider that the same priority it was in 2004 though.
ZoFreX 12y ago
Cautionary tale: They were bundled separately for Internet Explorer, and everyone assumed they didn't exist. Even now you can see people complaining that say, "developing for IE 6 was hard because it didn't have developer tools".
- chippy 12y ago
  I think most of the developers I knew were saying "because it didn't have any good developer tools"
asadotzler 12y ago
View source, the original developer tool, is why the Web is so generative and has been for two decades, IMO. Today's developer tools are just an extension of that ancient view source capability. The web is not like other platforms where there's a hard line between people who make it and people who use it. Many people, like myself, thought of themselves as users until the web's view source made it possible for us to become content producers with no significant additional tooling. Today, the Web is a lot more complex a platform than it was in the early 90s and so our view source and JS consoles have evolved into more capable developer tools as a result.
mikeratcliffe 12y ago
Our devtools have unit tests that run for every tiny change that is made to Firefox. Building the tools in gives much more stability. We are also using and exposing a lot of low level Firefox stuff and fixing bugs as a result. So in short you get a better, more extensible browser, more stability and the chance to take a look at how something you use every day works. It's a win-win in my opinion.

fidotron 12y ago

Is this itself entirely a webapp? As an aside, I'm amazed the way Mozilla have co-opted the term "Web" to mean whatever they want it to. The way they've branded all sorts of non-standard APIs in FFOS "Web" APIs to confuse people into thinking these are somehow more open than anything else is impressive.

rimantas 12y ago
Mozilla lost their focus long ago. They are now mostly political organisation with side busines of making software and financed by a competitor. I loved them so much since the days of the Phoenix (I think it was 0.6 which I made my default browser), I admired Blake Ross. They had a great goal: to make the best browser. Now? I couldn't care less. I don't know who the leader is, or do they even have one. I know they are good I writing manifestos and have some evangelists not too shy to lie. Will those political games help anyone? I doubt so. But if once great organisation is determined to become irrelevant, how can you forbid that? MDN is good, though.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  Mozilla is not Apple, they can very much function without a leader. They have the ONLY fully featured modern browser that is also free software. IMHO, it fits the "make the best browser" philosophy.
blueveek 12y ago
> Is this itself entirely a webapp? Actually, yes: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtools/app-manager http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtoo...
- fidotron 12y ago
  XUL is a web technology now? That's my point. It's not. EDIT: ici: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtools/app-manager/content/index.xul http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtoo...

thegeomaster 12y ago

This should be a separate tool. An add-on, or whatever, but it shouldn't be bundled with the browser. If you think about it, it doesn't make much sense. Do you see audio mixing/mastering or video editing software being bundled with media players? Or do you see word processors/TeX IDEs bundled with PDF viewers? No, because you wanted to play your Black Sabbath .mp3, or read a .pdf scientific paper. If you wanted to record your Black Sabbath tribute band and produce the recording, you'd get a digital audio workstation. If you wanted to write your own scientific paper, you'd get a TeX bundle. If you wanted to develop web apps, you'd want to download an IDE. Not use a web browser. A vast, vast majority of people downloading Firefox wants to just look at damn web pages. The ones who want to make them are welcome to get dedicated software. Developers of that separate program for web dev could then go crazy and add a lot of features that wouldn't be possible so easily if it was bundled in a browser. Everyone wins. So why this? No one is being done a favor by bundling a web IDE with a browser. A bullshit token reason like "it's easier for novices" will not qualify.

applecore 12y ago
The democratization of the web gives people who have been consumers the ability to be creators. The tools of creation belong in everyone's hands.
- nfoz 12y ago
  Yes but they don't all need to be exactly a single tool, a single process! Just like I really don't want a web browser in my file manager / operating system / text editor.... wait all of that already happened. sigh.
- sigzero 12y ago
  And? That doesn't mean it cannot be a plugin.
  - asadotzler 12y ago
    If view source had been a developer plug-in in the 90's, I'll bet there would be a lot fewer web developers today.

binarymax 12y ago

Always glad to see more things happening in this space, but most devs already BYOIDE and would probably just like better integration with their existing tools: http://remotedebug.org/ http://remotedebug.org/

campd 12y ago
Integration with external editors/IDEs is a very important part of this project. A lot of what WebIDE brings to the party on top of normal editing is device/simulator management as well as the usual Developer Tools inspection and debugging. So there are three layers of compatibility we expect to see with external IDEs: 0) No integration - Open a WebIDE window with editing turned off and use it (or command line tools that drive it) to manage device connections/pushing/etc. 1) Simple integration - Most of the basic device connection management will be available through command line tools, it should be incredibly easy to drive that through editor/IDE configuration. 2) The whole nine yards: Speak a remote debugging protocol and get full control over the debuggee. As far as the whole nine yards, you can either use remotedebug's protocol and proxies (although development seems to have trailed off there?), speak each browser's protocol natively, or maybe down the road the protocol abstraction we're working on at Mozilla.

kibwen 12y ago

> We’re working on a protocol adapter that will allow > clients using the Firefox Remote Debugging Protocol – > including the Developer Tools and WebIDE – talk to all > mobile browsers, regardless of rendering engine or > runtime. Our first targets are Chrome for Android and > Safari on iOS. My company expects all of our internal web applications to function on the executives' iPads, but they refuse to purchase Macs on which to debug issues that manifest only on mobile Safari. And since the mobile Safari developer console was disabled in iOS 6, I haven't come up with anything better than alert-based debugging techniques (Firebug Lite was broken the last time that I tried, though admittedly that was a while ago). If Mozilla truly reverse-engineers Apple's remote debugging protocol it would be a godsend for us. (And if I'm just an idiot who's overlooking some simple way of debugging mobile Safari, please let me know.)

27182818284 12y ago
The sad answer is that your co' is what is incorrect. If you have "executives" plural you have the budget in your organization to buy a dev mac and a dev device.
- kibwen 12y ago
  I agree that they're being foolish (though hey, they're the ones paying me to waste my time), but I'm just as peeved at Apple for removing a perfectly-workable self-contained solution in favor of yet more platform lock-in.
  - JohnTHaller 12y ago
    > but I'm just as peeved at Apple for removing a perfectly-workable self-contained solution in favor of yet more platform lock-in. Peeved, but not surprised, given their track record.
colinramsay 12y ago
I've never tried it, but how about this? http://developer.telerik.com/featured/a-concise-guide-to-remote-debugging-on-ios-android-and-windows-phone/#weinre http://developer.telerik.com/featured/a-concise-guide-to-rem... Or, run OSX in a Windows virtual machine? You could us Safari remote debugging then.

BaconJuice 12y ago

Anyone know how I can access this on Windows XP? Don't seem to see the option to click "Web IDE" on Developer tools?

jryans 12y ago
The menu option is still named "App Manager" in today's Nightly. It will be renamed to WebIDE in tomorrow's build.
codepo8-hn 12y ago
App Manager. The label will be renamed in tomorrow's Nightly/
kwierso 12y ago
You need to enable it by flipping devtools.webide.enabled to true in about:config first.
01Michael10 12y ago
You have bigger problems then how to run "Web IDE"... Why are you running Firefox nighties on Windows XP? You trying to have the most unstable and insecure box possible?

edwinnathaniel 12y ago

Developing a moderately complicated plugins on Firefox and Chrome is a major PITA currently (not to mention that JavaScript is... somewhat moderately PITA to deal with as well). I just wish that these vendors behind web browsers would put more effort on cleaning up their acts on the plugins development as well (stable and useful docs, tutorials, more tutorials, and mooooreee tutorials, sane development environment without jumping through hoops, better integration with IDEs and whatnot), not just building infrastructure upon infrastructure in which the development and deployment to the said infrastructure is PITA.

simonsarris 12y ago

This is fantastic and I'm really glad it's being bundled with Firefox and not as a separate download. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of kids still assume that programming is essentially "magic" done by professionals and they implicitly assume there is no way to getting started at their education level (This is especially true if their parents are non-technical, as mine were). All the resources in the world may exist, but they may not be obvious unless you look for them. When I was a kid I assumed that programmers were all professionals with a billion years of training and their own special equipment. Today I know the only difference between a programmer and a yet-to-be-programmer kid are bigger feet and a coffee addiction, the computers are the very same. But I didn't know that back then - I wish someone told me. I think it is extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?" Putting an IDE inside the browser, having no other dependencies between viewing web-pages and making web-pages is an incredible first step. I await the day any kid asks "How do I make my own webpages?" and we can answer "You've already got everything you need, just press F12." There's an art to making seemingly insurmountable things appear doable, like becoming a programmer if you have no programmer role models, and I think we should give it more attention. The web makes it easier than ever, and while a bundled IDE isn't going to be the Geocities or Bob Ross equivalent, it's definitely the next step in reducing the friction of getting started. Bravo, Firefox team.

super_mario 12y ago
What? Kids ARE the experts and if you have spent time to become a professional you are already too old. Haven't you read the agism article on HN today?
cbhl 12y ago
> the computers are the very same. What do you do when you run into a kid holding an iPad?
- cclogg 12y ago
  An iPad could be a good stepping stone. For me it was Nintendo as a kid that then got me into computer games, which then got me into making my own stuff, which then made me into a programmer today heh.

zo1 12y ago

It's neat and all, but please Mozilla, don't include this with Firefox. At the very least, have a separate lean-version that doesn't have this "fluff" included. And a developer/power-user version that includes it. I understand that web-app development is big, and it's the "new-desktop", but that doesn't mean that this awesome browser should include everything and the kitchen sink.

robin_reala 12y ago
If it’s anything like the existing developer tools it’ll be fairly hidden and lazy-loaded when needed. I wouldn’t worry too much.

chippy 12y ago

Netscape had an editor way back when also.

agentultra 12y ago

This is amazing work. I hope it continues to go even further. I'd like to see a browser that is really just implemented on top of a kernel with full programmatic access to everything from the top down: just as Emacs happens to be a text editor built on the elisp kernel, Firefox could happen to be a browser built on a web kernel. Everything that drives the UI are just functions that could just as easily be invoked from the scratch pad. If you know a bit of javascript you can write a few of your own functions to automate some common browsing tasks. And if you need even more functionality you can dig deeper and write your own libraries that seamlessly integrate into the kernel without a hitch and can be invoked from your own menus. No plugin tom-foolery or artificial walls around the garden. Looking forward to seeing how this develops!

past 12y ago
You are pretty much describing the Firefox architecture. We are invoking Firefox UI code from scratchpad all the time when prototyping things. Some parts of the UI do not use standard Web APIs (e.g. XUL and XBL), as there are different opinions on how the web platform should evolve to fulfill those needs, but if you include all the experimental technologies to this web kernel, we are already there.

z3t4 12y ago

It makes sense so ship an editor with a reader. So that you can communicate both ways, both create and consume. Now we only need a way to share!

mongrol 12y ago

Looking forward to the new Pheonix when someone gets fed up enough with the current heavyweight Firefox to write it.

asadotzler 12y ago
The challenge here is that Gecko is the heavyweight bit here, not Firefox. If you wanted to shrink the size of Firefox dramatically, you could not do so without removing Web functionality (as opposed to Firefox functionality.) I'd love to see someone give that a shot. It was really three or four people who "Firefoxed" the old Mozilla Suite and there's nothing stopping some similarly motivated group from giving it a go. Still, I don't think they'd get nearly as far as we did back in 2002 and 2003, because Firefox is actually very trim and fit. There aren't a lot of extra features to cut and the code implementing most features is smart enough not to waste resources when not in use.

dingdingdang 12y ago

Holy shit that's cool! Makes me want to get a FF phone.. just about now!

dschulz 12y ago

Yay! Can't wait to download an even bigger package to update my browser.. now with plenty of features I don't need. Looking forward to the {emacs,Lua,Perl}-embedded-Firefox!

niutech 12y ago

Google is working on an IDE inside Chrome, too. It's called Spark: https://github.com/dart-lang/spark https://github.com/dart-lang/spark