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The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#151

Post by azernik »

callahad wrote: post #146
mariusandreiana wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ca…

Or Firefox Dev Tools -> Settings -> [x] Disable Cache (when toolbox is open) :)

I suspect a lot of the "dev edition" will just be a different set of defaults :)

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#152

Post by ksk »

swift wrote: post #141
ksk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This speaks to the general low quality of web specifications and/or inability of browser developers to create robust implementations of those specs. In the vast majority of scenarios we don't think about using the same processor to experience the same thing a user does. (Certainly driver developers and other low level h/w people will occasionally run into h/w bugs but they're in a very niche field).

The web platform is a lot more complicated than any ISA. The right comparison is having the same operating system version as the user, and anyone that develops native apps does have to care about that.

>The web platform is a lot more complicated than any ISA.

Talk to intel engineers and you'll soon be disabused of that notion ;)

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#153

Post by strommen »

callahad wrote: post #73
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'm not sure I see condescension here. Everyone does deserve access to built-in, high-quality tools. And everyone already gets that, with all major browsers. No one is taking away the built in developer tools in Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, or Opera. The problem is that they're always just a little bit older than the tip of the current development branch. And that's fine for folks who are starting to teach themselves…

Everybody gets developer tools today.

But if there's a special developer-only Firefox, the dev tools in "regular" Firefox will stop getting new features, will fall out of date, stop providing value, and eventually be removed.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#154

Post by Joeri »

azernik wrote: post #149
Joeri wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite see it that way. > 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. I don't see any inherent conflict between preventing sites from having access to the local filesystem, while having powerful local filesystem access from the browser's integrated devtools…

WRT caching, the experience of a developer is already completely different from that for a user - assets on a dev instance of you infrastructure (including both code and static files) are changing multiple times a minute.

I don't think that should necessarily be the case. By persisting resources in the cache after they are changed on the server there is an implicit promise of broken user experiences, since there is no control over which files are loaded from cache and which ones are not (so even for "harmless" images users will see mismatched artwork in the real world). Whatever caching strategy is used for production servers, it should involve a way to make sure users are fetching the latest version of a resource. The dev server can be configured identically and it will still do the right thing. Admittedly when you throw CDN's and other intermediates into the mix it becomes harder to have matching environments, but differences should be minimized as much as possible as a matter of development policy.

My dev server is set up identically to a production server, except that no concatenation or minification is done. I'm not happy with that last compromise, so fingers crossed that HTTP/2 gets here soon and we can stop concatenating, minifying and otherwise perverting our code and resources.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#155

Post by canuckistani »

lachgr wrote: post #18

I think this is a logical development. Firefox gets more and more Developer tools by default, but most users will never touch them. So it sounds logical to exclude Developer tools from the default package and instead offer an Developer version of Firefox. Firefox is my default browser for a long time (switched briefly to Opera, but when they came with the new Chromium-version I switched back because I didn't like it)…

We have no plans to remove the tools from Firefox release.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#156

Post by StefanKarpinski »

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…

If you translate your entire comment to the non-browser development arena, it seems totally nuts. Should everyone have a full development toolchain on the 12" laptop they use to check email and read the news? I have four C compilers, three versions of Python, two Fortran compilers (and a partridge in a pear tree) on my laptop for my day-to-day development activities. Should we stuff all that in a browser? That's obviously extreme, but the point is that insisting on shipping a full developer environment to normal users just serves to limit that developer environment; at some point developers are going to want some crazy stuff that's just unreasonable to force everyone to download. By all means, leave basic debugging stuff in every browser but don't limit the tools pros can use to just that.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#157

Post by goblin89 »

callahad wrote: post #77
snlacks wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would probably start the trend of the dev features being reduced in regular browsers, I'd guess. But you're right no one is taking it away yet.

Why would any browser vendor have an incentive to remove or restrict developer features in released browsers?

It seems like it’d be beneficial to many web publishers if browser users couldn’t easily access underlying resources, and those companies could incentivize popular vendors to go in that direction (and every decent browser auto-updates, of course). Suddenly bypassing Flickr’s spaceball becomes too complicated for regular user.

On the other hand, no one would bother with that in a world where non-mobile computers are increasingly becoming developer-only machines, so this is probably just mild paranoia.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#160

Post by sbensu »

The ultimate feature for hackers is how hackable something is. That means it is easier to develop the version for hackers first, and then package a specific version for end-users. Therefore, if they do develop a hackable browser and allow everybody to innovate on it, they may well be in their way to create the next best browser.

This paradox is similar to creating a new microcomputer only for hackers (Apple I/II) which in turns allows them to develop cool stuff on it (Visicalc) which in turn makes it the standard for all users.

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