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WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

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111–120 of 154 posts

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#111
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

There will still be a need for dedicated computer programmers, but I think that if everyone had basic scripting knowledge or at least was not afraid of gaining that knowledge, the world would be a better place for it. And if more people understood what it took to program, there might be less under or overestimating of the value of a good programmer.

That's the optimist's outlook.

I could just as easily envision an army of cheap, self-taught "programmers" making applications held together with spit and glue and causing a race to the bottom in the industry (see the residential construction industry for an example of this).

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#112
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…

Here's a crazy idea: what if we stop buying apple products until they stop pulling this walled garden crap and we are free to use the overpriced hardware we paid for as we damn please?

most customers don't realize the garden is walled.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's only in index.xul, which is a very small part of the project. Everything else is plain old js+html (xhtml necessary for localization). Apologies, I didn't notice that when I said "there's no XUL in there". As a meta-discussion, is just a fancy way of saying: div { display: -moz-box; -moz-box-orient: vertical; } ...which is the old flexbox implementation. But I digress :) edit: link to the MDN article…

We could probably rewrite the entire Firefox UI in HTML nowadays, but that'd mostly be busywork (and would break a bunch of extensions). I would bet that Servo's UI will just be HTML.

Servo is just the browser engine, like Gecko. The UI/browser-chrome will be a separate project (named Crow, but not started yet afaik). Also relevant is the fact that Servo wants to be embeddable, like Webkit.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#114

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.

The manual that came with the Apple IIc my family had when I was a kid included sections on programming the computer with Applesoft BASIC. What an optimistic thing to include in the manual that every user gets! And, yet, those were the first lines of code I ever typed into a computer and I'm still doing it 30 years later.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#115
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

See also the profilist extension:

* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#116
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting an IDE inside the browser, having no other dependencies between viewing web-pages and making web-pages is an incredible first step. I... um, it's a first step we took 17 years ago, didn't we? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer

A first step on a sinking ship doesn't count.

Mozilla Composer was part of the Mozilla Suite (a predecessor of Firefox).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Composer

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#117

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,…

> 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."

Small correction: they'll ask "How do I make my own apps?"

And the answer will be the same.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#118

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…

Macs come with Python (and Idle is included), Ruby, PHP, Perl, BASH, Apache web server, git, Vim, Emacs, Pico, Nano etc and XCode with clang for C/C++/Objective C/Objective C++ is a free download (used to ship on OS DVD but OS is no longer shipped on physical media).

Java used to be bundled too out of the box, but Apple has deprecated their JVM. Of course Oracle has up to date JDK for OS X now.

Really getting compilers and dev tools for Unix OSes is trivially easy. Almost everything is free if not open source.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#119
post #56

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…

There is is a windows version too: https://github.com/artygus/ios-webkit-debug-proxy-win32

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was writing web pages with very little technical ability Yes, a little . Similarly, I sad a degree of technical expertise. Not a lot, just a little, but enough to differentiate the creator from the consumer. Today, even if browsers don't have "View Source", you can search Google for "how to make web sites", and a zillion results would pop up. It's not a roadblock.

Not everyone learns by reading a book or article. Lots of people learn by tinkering.

It's hard, if not impossible, to learn stuff exclusively by tinkering. I developed my interest in HTML because I clicked an "Edit in FrontPage" button in IE6 (or was it IE5/4?), but I don't think I could learn HTML in thorough detail just by poking around FrontPage. The Internet then came to my rescue.

My point is, even if IE didn't include that toolbar button, I would've started up FrontPage on my computer sooner or later. It was just a matter of timing and a string of coincidences. Some other string of coincidences could've led me there, too. I say that the argument "some people would tinker and by moving the IDE into an add-on wouldn't let them tinker enough" is pretty weak. If you're curious about something, you tend not to get stopped by things such as that: that curiosity drives you to poke around incrementally until you either find what you're looking for or fuck up the computer (well, at the time, this was something I was prone to doing often because I loved messing with Windows' system files :)

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