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WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

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Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#81

Post by yeukhon »

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…

Modularity is a great idea, but modularity isn't always a solution. Sometimes, tight, monolithic integration is better, for both developers and end user.

As an example, some companies have a single source tree with every project. Why the hell would they do that? Make 100 repos on github is better - you know which repo is which repo. Maintenance and usage headache.

> A vast, vast majority of people downloading Firefox wants to just look at damn web pages.

So why bundle dev tools in the first place? Remove dev tools will definitely slim firefox's size and memory footprint. Forget about error logging (null them); if you are developer just install addon so you can pipe the errors. That's better! Lightweight browser for the rest of the non-developer user! Win!

Of course that won't work for Mozilla. They are not interested in maintain two separate set of builds. I am not going to do that for my software either. It's a lot of work.

> If you wanted to develop web apps, you'd want to download an IDE. Not use a web browser.v

Nope. I can do this with Word, python -m SimpleHTTPServer, and a web browser to write code, test code and see code in live action. Why I don't do that and use an IDE or vim? Because of convenience.

Firefox has a feature called scratchpad. See [1], and the point is that you can experiment your javascript code without having to squeeze your code into the console. It also reduces the headache of copy-paste code back and forth between console and some other places (you can't save your console code, so where do you get the code? Some file!)

I wrote one add-on and the workflow is awful. See [2]. I wish I could write add-on in scratchpad without having to repeat those steps and can see error immediately by a click on scratchpad. Maybe scratchpad has this feature I am not aware of...

The point is, I hate to switch back and forth between the browser, my vim terminal and the web console.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/devtools/2011/08/15/introducing-scr...

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Ge...

> A bullshit token reason like "it's easier for novices" will not qualify.

No this is not bullshit, because developers are users and some users turn into developers BECAUSE they poke around tools available to them.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#82

Post by maccard »

phkahler wrote: post #29
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…

"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, and that's a problem. Do you see programming languages shipped with every computer? No, but that's how it used to be. Most shipped with BASIC while Unix shipped with C. I guess Macs come with Python, but just CLI no IDE - not even idle. Is there some rea…

> Is there some reason not to ship development tools? Do you not want the curious to have ready access to dig in and understand the stuff they use every day?

More and mroe macs are being sold with SSD's, and installing Xcode uses a good 4-5 gigs (+1GB per platform in documentation). That's a good enough reason for me to not install it when I don't need it.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#83

Post by Excavator »

gdulli wrote: post #31
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…

I agree. I'd be happy with launching firefox in a more lightweight non-web-dev mode for everyday browsing and then web-dev mode with all the extra tools and UI elements. The cool thing about that would be that the developer tools could be more tightly integrated with the UI because they wouldn't have to be hidden from the majority of people who would never need them.

You can use Profiles¹ for that sort of stuff. about:config² is good for a somewhat complete list of components that can be enabled/disabled.

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

2: about:config?filter=.enabled

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#84

Post by spacefight »

blueveek wrote: post #69
fidotron wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XUL is a web technology now? That's my point. It's not. EDIT: ici: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/devtoo...

There is no XUL in there.

Last time I checked, the vbox/hbox is XUL. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XUL/vbox

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#85

Post by cloakandswagger »

phkahler wrote: post #29
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…

"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, and that's a problem. Do you see programming languages shipped with every computer? No, but that's how it used to be. Most shipped with BASIC while Unix shipped with C. I guess Macs come with Python, but just CLI no IDE - not even idle. Is there some rea…

>Do you not want the curious to have ready access to dig in and understand the stuff they use every day?

Yeah, pretty much.

Combine offshoring with the baffling obsession some programmers have with teaching EVERYONE their trade and you can expect compensation levels to plummet in the coming years.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#86

Post by jpalomaki »

simonsarris wrote: post #54

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,…

This is a little bit like the early home computers. You could start writing code (basic) immediately after switching on the computer. Copy a few lines of code from magazine and see what it does.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#87

Post by blueicelt2004 »

smacktoward wrote: post #42
chousuke wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead of a one-time cost, they'd rather bleed money due to lowered productivity? I don't know how much time you spend developing internal tools, but I'd expect the cost in lost time to surpass the cost of a few (possibly shared) development machines rather quickly.

Never underestimate the ability of managers to be penny wise and pound foolish.

...or the inability of developers to properly demonstrate to their managers why something is needed. simply saying it makes it easier is not enough, learn to sell and spin in a way that does not make you seem lazy and you will be surprised what you can convince people to do.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#89

Post by vlunkr »

simonsarris wrote: post #54

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,…

This is a good point. I was in the same position as you as a kid. I was interested in computers, but I didn't know anyone that could teach me much about them. I assumed in college they would teach you all the secrets, I had no idea that all the tools I needed were available online. With this IDE, the barrier is super low, if Mozilla decided to market it that way.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#90

Post by asadotzler »

thegeomaster wrote: post #40
gress wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. Just because economics have temporarily separated the means of creation from the means of consumption in some domains, there is no reason that they should not be recombined now that it can be done freely. Why shouldn't all systems be programmable?

Sorry, but this looks like you're attacking a straw man. I never said that "not all systems should be programmable". My actual belief is, as a matter of fact, completely opposed to that. What I'm saying is that you do and will for a long time need a degree of technical expertise to develop webpages. The gap is shrinking, but will exist for at least quite some time. I'm not being an elitist, just real. The technical e…

"What I'm saying is that you do and will for a long time need a degree of technical expertise to develop webpages."

This is simply wrong. I was writing web pages with very little technical ability starting way back in 1996 because view source was built in and not an add-on and that made it easy to learn without any technical expertise. Today the web platform is richer and so it makes good sense for the view source of today to also be richer.

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