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WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

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Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#51

Post by edwinnathaniel »

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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#52

Post by angersock »

jaredmcateer wrote: post #20
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 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.

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).

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#53

Post by paulirish »

Sephr wrote: post #37
kibwen wrote: post #24

> 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…

Mozilla didn't have to reverse engineer anything. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all aim to support http://remotedebug.org/

Not accurate right now. Firefox and Chrome spoke about this at EdgeConf this year, along with the remotedebug founder, and basically said "Please go forth and develop a shim layer common protocol in the community. However, all browser vendors standardizing to a common protocol would slow us down too much." Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQG6PljqmLc#t=1013 (around this timecode)

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#54

Post by simonsarris »

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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#55

Post by zo1 »

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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#56

Post by kibwen »

paulirish wrote: post #50
kibwen wrote: post #24

> 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…

> If Mozilla truly reverse-engineers Apple's remote debugging protocol it would be a godsend for us. Google did this a while ago: https://github.com/google/ios-webkit-debug-proxy It works well for connecting Chrome DevTools to Safari, automating Mobile Safari through ChromeDriver, or hooking up your iOS device to a private instance of WebPageTest.

Thanks, I've never heard of this before and it sounds very useful.

...Or rather, it would be very useful were it not for the fact that it only appears to run on Linux and OS X, whereas my employer-granted computer is running—drumroll, please—Windows XP! And like I said, these are all internal applications, and I don't have the authority to VPN in on any computer that I please.

Ah well. Enterprise bureaucracy strikes again. :\

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#57

Post by kibwen »

27182818284 wrote: post #28
kibwen wrote: post #24

> 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…

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.

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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#58

Post by Svip »

toyg wrote: post #39
thegeomaster wrote: post #15

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 re…

We've gone full circle: Firefox/Phoenix was born as a way to separate the browser from (guess what) html-authoring, email, calendaring etc, which used to be "the same program" aka Netscape Communicator / Mozilla Suite. The split basically killed off most of the orphaned components. Now Mozilla are busy rebuilding an html-authoring tool and packing it into the browser. I bet messaging will follow.

Psst! They call the suite SeaMonkey today.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#59

Post by ZoFreX »

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.

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".

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#60

Post by magicalist »

kibwen wrote: post #56
paulirish wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Mozilla truly reverse-engineers Apple's remote debugging protocol it would be a godsend for us. Google did this a while ago: https://github.com/google/ios-webkit-debug-proxy It works well for connecting Chrome DevTools to Safari, automating Mobile Safari through ChromeDriver, or hooking up your iOS device to a private instance of WebPageTest.

Thanks, I've never heard of this before and it sounds very useful. ...Or rather, it would be very useful were it not for the fact that it only appears to run on Linux and OS X, whereas my employer-granted computer is running—drumroll, please—Windows XP! And like I said, these are all internal applications, and I don't have the authority to VPN in on any computer that I please. Ah well. Enterprise bureaucracy strikes…

That sucks, though it would definitely be much easier to run a virtual linux instance on that box than an OS X one as someone else suggested.

I will say that being able to debug pages in mobile safari directly (via Safari on a mac) makes a huge difference, so if this works even partially as well, it's worth investigating if you can get it running.

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