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Firefox Developer Edition

developer.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#221

Post by nnethercote »

nubs wrote: post #172
callahad wrote: post #43

Hi! Just a heads up that folks from the dev tools team will be monitoring this thread and are on-hand to answer questions. We'll try not to thread sit too much. :) In brief, the Developer Edition is a new release channel for Firefox, replacing Aurora (our pre-Beta channel). Everything else about the release cadence is the same. There are four major new features here: 1. The Firefox Tools Adapter ("Valence"), which le…

I would love the ability to easily spin up multiple profiles at one time. Having the separate profile for Dev Edition should help, but sometimes I want a few others as well (depending on the task at hand). Ideally, It'd be best to be able to open a new tab inside of a different profile and just be able to tab back and forth between the different profiles.

If you're running from the command line, you can use the `--ProfileManager` option to create new profiles, and then you can start separate browser instances with `-P --no-remote`.

Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#222

Post by mbrubeck »

acqq wrote: post #190
Yoric wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not the "new rules", that's the "rules that have been in place forever, but if you are familiar with Chrome, these are the same." The new rules is that Developer Edition takes place of Aurora in that scheme.

Your "in place forever" conflicts with the comment to which I have asked for an explanation what the new rules are: callahad: "5. We have a new channel, which new rules." (sic) Note that the Developer Edition is definitely new (1), and callahad also explains in his reply where it is positioned: "As far as fundamental web platform features are concerned, the Developer Edition is a normal pre-Beta channel. It's primari…

We've done that frequently with the Aurora channel too, so in terms of release management rules, it's just a new name and focus for an existing channel.

Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#223

Post by nnethercote »

KyleSanderson wrote: post #147

Not to be the guy to bring this up again, but if this is targeted for development why are sessions still limited to consuming 2GB of memory? Why is nightly still the only branch with 64bit builds?

Win64 builds aren't quite ready yet, but they're being actively worked on and a lot of progress has been made recently. Just a little longer now!

Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#224

Post by nnethercote »

plainOldText wrote: post #194

Why the black theme? I think that as developers/designers we should use environments which closely resemble that of the users we're creating for. Colors influence people's emotions, as well as how they perceive a specific design. Even if you are a designer, you're still a user; a user of your own creations. And when you change the mindset to that of a user, why not change the environment as well? (just a thought)

I suspect the motivation is to make it easy to distinguish the developer edition from the normal browser when you're running them side-by-side. There's a light theme that you can switch to from within the developer tools panel.

Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#225

Post by nnethercote »

towelguy wrote: post #38

Why emphatize on the download button that it is a "free download"? Maybe they'll add a payed option in the future?

User feedback in the past has shown that a surprising number of people assume/fear they'll have to pay for it if you don't clearly say that it's free.

Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#226

Post by nnethercote »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #63
warcode wrote: post #52

Will this version survive months of usage with multiple open tabs without performance deteriorating massively like the regular firefox? I left FF after my 10th profile reset / reinstall to get back to "normal" performance.

I swear this type of comment is becoming like a meme, it's pretty much repeated on every HN thread about Firefox. The response is standard too... Electrolysis. Wait for it. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Roadmap

In my experience this kind of response was typical a few years ago, but Firefox's performance has improved so much over the past few years that complaints are much less frequent, and when they do occur there is now typically quite a bit of pushback.

Electrolysis will help with some performance problems, but not all.

Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#227

Post by nnethercote »

acdha wrote: post #133
warcode wrote: post #52

Will this version survive months of usage with multiple open tabs without performance deteriorating massively like the regular firefox? I left FF after my 10th profile reset / reinstall to get back to "normal" performance.

This is almost certainly caused by an extension. If you use Firefox with few or no extensions (e.g. 1Password doesn't cause problems) you'll find this doesn't happen.

Although badly-written extensions do cause a lot of problems, please don't assume they cause every problem. It's not always true and comments like these give the impression that Firefox developers simply pass the buck every time somebody complains.

Having said that, if someone is experiencing bad performance and they do have extensions enabled, temporarily disabling them is a good diagnostic step. If performance improves, it's clear that it's an extension at fault, and then bisection can be used to work out which one. Otherwise, it's clearly a Firefox problem and a bug report (bugzilla.mozilla.org) would be very helpful!

Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#228

Post by acqq »

mbrubeck wrote: post #222
acqq wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your "in place forever" conflicts with the comment to which I have asked for an explanation what the new rules are: callahad: "5. We have a new channel, which new rules." (sic) Note that the Developer Edition is definitely new (1), and callahad also explains in his reply where it is positioned: "As far as fundamental web platform features are concerned, the Developer Edition is a normal pre-Beta channel. It's primari…

We've done that frequently with the Aurora channel too, so in terms of release management rules, it's just a new name and focus for an existing channel.

Does it mean

Developer Edition == Aurora + different default settings + additional tools?

Or, what are the exact differences between Aurora and Developer Edition?

Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#229

Post by acdha »

rkwz wrote: post #91
callahad wrote: post #43

Hi! Just a heads up that folks from the dev tools team will be monitoring this thread and are on-hand to answer questions. We'll try not to thread sit too much. :) In brief, the Developer Edition is a new release channel for Firefox, replacing Aurora (our pre-Beta channel). Everything else about the release cadence is the same. There are four major new features here: 1. The Firefox Tools Adapter ("Valence"), which le…

> What tools do you need? I wonder where do you draw a line for a developer oriented browser. Is a good 'line' be tools for 'whatever loads on page'? Since we already have color picker etc, I think good candidates are * Onscreen ruler * Gradient generator * Builtin JSfiddle * CSS sprite generator * Image to base64 * JS/HTML/CSS formatter * JSON tools - tree-viewer/formatter/validator * XML tools - tree-viewer/formatt…

The JavaScript view in the debugger already has a built-in prettifier – look for the {} icon in the lower left corner.

It'd be really nice to have that for CSS, particularly if it could do a side-by-side view for e.g. source-mapped original and prettified CSS-as-used.

Re: Firefox Developer Edition

#230

Post by nnethercote »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #171
ZenoArrow wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear this type of comment is becoming like a meme, it's pretty much repeated on every HN thread about Firefox. The response is standard too... Electrolysis. Wait for it. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Roadmap

I'm kind of hoping that Eloctrolysis never becomes main-line. Right now I have a browser that isolates misbehaving web pages (Chrome) and a browser that allows me to have a million open tabs simultaneously (Firefox). If I could only choose one I'd choose the browser that isolates misbehaving web pages but both is even better.

Electrolysis will initially only have two processes: one for chrome (i.e. UI) and one for web content. More content processes may be used in the future, but we will move very slowly and carefully in that direction. I consider the several-hundred-tabs-open use case to be an important one, and will do my best to ensure it continues to work in the future.

I personally think the number of browser processes shouldn't exceed the number of tabs because you won't get any responsiveness improvements beyond that, and it'll keep the memory usage reasonably low.

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