Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 154 posts

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#3

Post by Deutscher »

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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#4

Post by codepo8-hn »

makmanalp wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#5

Post by josso »

Deutscher wrote: post #3

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.

Regarding #2: The developer tools don't run unless they're opened, so that shouldn't affect any normal users.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#6

Post by eumenides1 »

Deutscher wrote: post #3

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.

I agree. I feel like mozilla is going back to it's roots of a multifaceted beast.

This should be a plugin like firebug.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#7

Post by campd »

Deutscher wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#8

Post by khc »

Deutscher wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#9

Post by fidotron »

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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#10

Post by codepo8-hn »

Deutscher wrote: post #3

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.

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.
Post reply on HN