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WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

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Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#91

Post by asadotzler »

Deutscher wrote: post #3

I've always wondered why developer tools are bundled with browsers. Shouldn't they be available as separate downloads as: 1. Most people use browsers compared to working with them for development, and 2. The additional tools just add to the package size and possibly increased resource usage (if they are running with the rest of the browser)? Thanks in advance for the replies.

View source, the original developer tool, is why the Web is so generative and has been for two decades, IMO. Today's developer tools are just an extension of that ancient view source capability.

The web is not like other platforms where there's a hard line between people who make it and people who use it. Many people, like myself, thought of themselves as users until the web's view source made it possible for us to become content producers with no significant additional tooling.

Today, the Web is a lot more complex a platform than it was in the early 90s and so our view source and JS consoles have evolved into more capable developer tools as a result.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#92

Post by asadotzler »

sigzero wrote: post #35
applecore wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The democratization of the web gives people who have been consumers the ability to be creators. The tools of creation belong in everyone's hands.

And? That doesn't mean it cannot be a plugin.

If view source had been a developer plug-in in the 90's, I'll bet there would be a lot fewer web developers today.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#93

Post by blueveek »

spacefight wrote: post #84
blueveek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no XUL in there.

Last time I checked, the vbox/hbox is XUL. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XUL/vbox

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 about `display: box`: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/box-orient

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#94

Post by thegeomaster »

asadotzler wrote: post #90
thegeomaster wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this looks like you're attacking a straw man. I never said that "not all systems should be programmable". My actual belief is, as a matter of fact, completely opposed to that. What I'm saying is that you do and will for a long time need a degree of technical expertise to develop webpages. The gap is shrinking, but will exist for at least quite some time. I'm not being an elitist, just real. The technical e…

"What I'm saying is that you do and will for a long time need a degree of technical expertise to develop webpages." This is simply wrong. I was writing web pages with very little technical ability starting way back in 1996 because view source was built in and not an add-on and that made it easy to learn without any technical expertise. Today the web platform is richer and so it makes good sense for the view source of…

> 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.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#95

Post by mercer »

kibwen wrote: post #78
robin_reala wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever thought about quitting and working for a company that doesn’t treat you like a child?

What, and not get paid to spend half my time on HN while the ravages of Sarbanes-Oxley grind productivity to a halt? (The funniest thing is that we're not even a public company, and have no shareholders to defraud. That's right, we opt in to Sox-compliance.)

That's interesting. Can you tell us why your company opted in?

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#96

Post by mercer »

maccard wrote: post #82
phkahler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> Is there some reason not to ship development tools? Do you not want the curious to have ready access to dig in and understand the stuff they use every day? More and mroe macs are being sold with SSD's, and installing Xcode uses a good 4-5 gigs (+1GB per platform in documentation). That's a good enough reason for me to not install it when I don't need it.

Does this argument apply to development tools in the browser, or do you think this is likely in the near future? As in, does it currently negatively affect performance or significantly impact the size of the browser (honest question)?

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#97

Post by mercer »

fidotron wrote: post #30
phkahler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

They won't though. All you see in web dev tools is the UI as all the actual clever stuff is still hidden away from you on servers.

With an increase of client-side apps combined with server api's this is less the case, though, isn't it?

I can imagine quite a few 'web apps' that won't try to actively obfuscate how their client app operates. In those cases having browser-based development tools makes it much easier to tinker with and inspect the app...

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#98

Post by akx »

simonsarris wrote: post #54

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,…

> 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

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#99

Post by asadotzler »

jaredmcateer wrote: post #20
Deutscher wrote: post #3

I've always wondered why developer tools are bundled with browsers. Shouldn't they be available as separate downloads as: 1. Most people use browsers compared to working with them for development, and 2. The additional tools just add to the package size and possibly increased resource usage (if they are running with the rest of the browser)? Thanks in advance for the replies.

I don't think Mozilla cares about the file size anymore. 10 years ago they cared about the file size of Firefox, the mandate was that it could not be greater than ~5mb, the stable download is now almost 6 times that size.

That wasn't a mandate. It was my proposal so I know. I suggested that we target "about the size of an MP3" because that was the most common unit of download that a lot of people understood in the early 2000s and downloading software was something people weren't terribly comfortable with. I did some quick estimates and came up with 4MB as the goal based on the size of popular MP3s. By the time we shipped Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, we managed to get the download to about 4.7MB.

That was 2004 though. Today the Web is a lot more capable because browsers are a lot more capable. Also, typical download bandwidth for consumers is a lot more capable than it was in 2004.

Most of the growth in Firefox download size since then is a result of Gecko/Web platform feature growth, not the GUI features that users interact with.

That web platform capability isn't free. It takes code to make JS dozens of times faster than it was in 2004. It takes code to add HTML5 and CSS 3 features, WebGL, WebRTC, and all of the other great stuff the Web platform includes today. That code makes the download larger.

That being said, I'd love to see another round of evaluation to see what can be trimmed or slimmed. I don't consider that the same priority it was in 2004 though.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#100

Post by kyllo »

yeukhon wrote: post #81
thegeomaster wrote: post #15

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…

Modularity is a great idea, but modularity isn't always a solution. Sometimes, tight, monolithic integration is better, for both developers and end user. As an example, some companies have a single source tree with every project. Why the hell would they do that? Make 100 repos on github is better - you know which repo is which repo. Maintenance and usage headache. > A vast, vast majority of people downloading Firefox…

Nope. I can do this with Word, python -m SimpleHTTPServer, and a web browser to write code, test code and see code in live action.

Wait, what is Word being used for, in this process?

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