WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

Doesn't that still add to the package size?

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.

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.

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.

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.