The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming • Hacker News Board

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#111

Post by callahad » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 5:50 PM UTC

vegabook wrote: post #86

First of all this is analogous to the irritating tendency of car manufacturers to "tease" models ahead of time. This may cut it for the average consumer, but here you are targeting the developers, and a straightforward, honest approach to launch would be more effective, in my view. Developers are blasé to any of the mind-tricks which marketing will dream up. Second, please do some moonshot stuff. Please just don't gi…

I'm likewise pretty surprised that this made it to the top of HN. If you want straightforward, technical announcements, watch https://hacks.mozilla.org/ instead of https://blog.mozilla.org. The latter is predominantly press releases and less-technical announcements.

Not that those things are bad, they're just meant for a different audience.

If you want more moonshot-y stuff, emscripten, asm.js, rust, and servo are all pretty worthy of your attention. :)

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#112

Post by phazmatis » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 5:56 PM UTC

Considering all the "helpful" features in chrome that get in the way of development (copying the url prepends "http://", even for IPs, for example), this is an important change.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#113

Post by Yoric » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 5:58 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #101

turingfail wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> canning WebSQL for spurious reasons The way to implement WebSQL is to copy SQLite 3.1.9. That is not exactly a baked specification, that is the kind of crap companies used to pull to make unimplementable "standards" for everyone who doesn't license their code and doing that a few times over a decade would make w3c compliant browsers pretty crappy.

So instead, invent something that's a piece of crap, and make the Web worse than what Android and iOS developers get for offline storage. SQLite is public domain, there's no need to license it. Sometimes worse is a better, and insisting on standards process purity in this case I think harmed developers and didn't help the Web at all. There was nothing wrong with SQLite from a licensing standpoint, and everyone could…

Reverse engineering a spec from an active product which regularly fixes bugs or adds new features? I'm not saying that it couldn't work, but I am not very optimistic.

Plus, I don't remember that anybody in w3c or whatwg actively defended that approach.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#114

Post by tiffanyricks » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 6:01 PM UTC

This is marketing at its best. Create a browser that developers like to use so they can build Mozilla compatible products for consumers. Then more the consumers will adopt this browser as their default browser.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#115

Post by Yoric » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 6:02 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #98

untog wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hardly grandstanding when it's the standard everyone agreed on. I agree that IndexedDB is awful and WebSQL was much better, but go shout at the W3C, not Mozilla.

The filesystem API was also nixed, so now people take to implementing fake filesystems on IndexDB, and implementing fake-SQL on top of IndexDB. On top of that, IndexDB performance isn't as great as it should be. With something like SQLite, I think it's fine to take a super mature platform and retroactively extract a specification from it (while 99% of the people just keep the original implementation), than to start w…

Well, the FileSystem API is still being worked on. Just quite different from what Chrome implemented (which was very Unix-centric, iirc).

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#116

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 6:02 PM UTC

callahad wrote: post #111

vegabook wrote: post #86

First of all this is analogous to the irritating tendency of car manufacturers to "tease" models ahead of time. This may cut it for the average consumer, but here you are targeting the developers, and a straightforward, honest approach to launch would be more effective, in my view. Developers are blasé to any of the mind-tricks which marketing will dream up. Second, please do some moonshot stuff. Please just don't gi…

I'm likewise pretty surprised that this made it to the top of HN. If you want straightforward, technical announcements, watch https://hacks.mozilla.org/ instead of https://blog.mozilla.org . The latter is predominantly press releases and less-technical announcements. Not that those things are bad, they're just meant for a different audience. If you want more moonshot-y stuff, emscripten, asm.js, rust, and servo are a…

[deleted]

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#117

Post by chrisseaton » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 6:02 PM UTC

phazmatis wrote: post #112

Considering all the "helpful" features in chrome that get in the way of development (copying the url prepends " http://" , even for IPs, for example), this is an important change.

What's wrong with prepending the protocol? And why should IP addresses by any different?

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#118

Post by jawerty » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 6:05 PM UTC

I'm still on the fence about having separate browsers for developers. It sounds nice as a concept but when I think about it more it seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

For instance, when I want to debug my website I go to the dev tools within the browser I'm viewing because I know that my users are viewing the same browser (typically). Having an entirely different developer browsers makes the debugging experience less realistic. It puts you in a position where you don't truly experience what the user does but what you feel more comfortable experiencing.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#119

Post by Yoric » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 6:05 PM UTC

Yoric wrote: post #59

panzi wrote: post #52

Sounds cool. Shame that Mozilla's developer tools are in some respects that are important to me still inferior to Chrome.

How so? I'm asking because two Firefox devtools people sit in my office, so if you have feedback, I can forward it.

Actually, callahad has suggested a much better interface for sending feedback to the devtools team: https://ffdevtools.uservoice.com

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#120

Post by mariusandreiana » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 6:05 PM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #75

justcommenting wrote: post #71

This seems to reinforce the mindset that the web should be experienced and built using different tools for users vs. developers, and aside from thinking that's fundamentally condescending, I don't see why new tools couldn't simply be extended from FF's 'web developer' menu into a different mode of operation or even extensions. I think we're better off in a world where kids don't have to install ScaryFox on their tabl…

I understand the point, but I think there is a reality where developing and actually experiencing the product can be fundamentally different. For instance the security model for a browser should be ultra tight and protect the user from the site, but as a developer I'd want to access and modify my files directly through the inspector panel. Another example would be the use of cache, where I want the minimum possible r…

>For instance the security model for a browser should be ultra tight and protect the user from the site, but as a developer I'd want to access and modify my files directly through the inspector panel.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=328026

>Another example would be the use of cache, where I want the minimum possible retention while a user would want the opposite.

Chrome Inspector -> [x] Disable cache (while DevTools is open)