back to article Mozilla to cram a full web-dev IDE inside Firefox browser

All of the major web browser vendors now ship developer tools with their products, but Mozilla is planning to go whole hog by building a full integrated development environment (IDE) for web apps right into its Firefox browser. WebIDE in Firefox Nightly - June 2014 Called – naturally enough – WebIDE, the feature is still in …

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  1. Robert E A Harvey

    Circle of time

    Are they trying to re-invent Netscape?

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Circle of time

      They CAME from Netscape.

      I loved Netscape Composer. It made building websites far faster than hand coding while also teaching me more about the underlying HTML.

      It also existed YEARS before Dreamweaver.

      If they can pull this off Adobe will lose a LOT of business. I already love the built in targeted code viewer FF has now, Inspect Element. Instead of having to scroll through lines and lines of code via View Source, I just highlight the element/area/segment I want to inspect, right click then select Inspect Element and voila! there it is right at the bottom of the screen with very handy descriptions just to the right.

      Suck it Adobe!

      1. Oninoshiko
        Thumb Up

        Re: Circle of time

        Yes they did come from netscape.

        They went to Firefox because netscape communicator had become a bloated pile of excrement. Now they are doing the same thing netscape did to communicator to FF, and everyone is just accepting google's spying and moving to crome.

        Good job Mozilla.

  2. Crazy Operations Guy

    Already done with the Mozilla engine

    SeaMonkey already has a 'compose' feature and built by Mozilla already, plus it has a mail client (Thunderbird) and an IRC/ICQ/Etc. client.

    1. RAMChYLD

      Re: Already done with the Mozilla engine

      >SeaMonkey already has a 'compose' feature and built by Mozilla already, plus it has a

      > mail client (Thunderbird) and an IRC/ICQ/Etc. client.

      Exactly my thought. Why reinvent the wheel when they could just beef up SeaMonkey's composer to bring it into the 21st century? It's a nice little thing that has been neglected so much it can only do HTML 4. They should just leave Firefox as is, people use it for the lack of bloat.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Already done with the Mozilla engine

        Seamonkey is a like a steamroller with the looks to match... people want more theses days. If you want a lamborghini, it's best to start from scratch than try and turn an ugly old steam engine into a sports car.

  3. JDX Gold badge

    Built into the browser?

    So in these days where we can supposedly do everything in open web technologies like JS, CSS & HTML5, FireFox have to build this kind of tool into the browser rather than doing it as a web-application?

    1. Deltics

      Re: Built into the browser?

      Web technologies !necessarily= web application.

      If you read the description of WebIDE I think you'll find that it does indeed use all of those lovely web technologies you list. It just does so in the browser without requiring a server.

      Newsflash - Client/Server is soooooooo 20th Century. We're all about distributed now, and in some cases the distribution right in front of you is all you need. ;)

      1. JDX Gold badge

        Re: Built into the browser?

        How wonderful, you mean I can develop in the browser without a web connection? I'm always wanting to user my browser offline!

        If only HTML5 provided a way to cache sites for offline viewing, maybe with some sort of "local storage", then this could all be done in a way which is accessible through any modern browser rather than requiring FireFox, and bloating FireFox still further with stuff 99.9% of users don't want.

  4. Gert Leboski

    Marvellous.

    Just what Firefox needs, more unnecessary bloat that only a minority of end users will actually use. This is more akin to the Microsoft way, where a word processor is used to render HTML based emails.

    THIS is why I use Unix and Linux wherever possible, because it is based around tool-chains and applications with a specific remit, which they do well.

    This is not a veiled swipe at Microsoft, just a rant at the majority of the popular, mainstream software industry, where everything seems to have to be all singing, all dancing.

    Remember KISS? Keep It Simple Stupid!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Marvellous.

      Yep.. 10 years ago Firefox was JUST a browser, and it was great.

      WebIDE looks like a training environment for Firefox OS mobile app creation. Try it out, then graduate to a grown-up webdev env, or iOS/Android. Should be a separate addon like Firebug.

    2. Euripides Pants
      Trollface

      Re: Remember KISS?

      I remember KISS.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI4yk-XeMBQ

  5. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

    Reinventing the wheel

    Those of us with long enough memories will remember that one of the reasons Firefox was forked from the Mozilla browser, was that Mozilla was based off the large behemoth that was Netscape Communicator. Firefox's claim was that it was lean and fast: All extraneous features were stripped out.

    How long before they add an IMAP/POP email client inside Firefox and complete the circle?

    "Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes"

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Reinventing the wheel

      I remember those days and, while I'm not particularly interested in this IDE, I do recognise the difference: this is built as an extension, i.e. you shouldn't notice it's their if you don't explicitly load it.

      This simply wasn't possible back in the day - Javascript wasn't sophisticated enough and the runtime and the machines weren't fast enough.

      Nowadays the JS runtimes are approaching the speed of native code. Gary Bernhardt gave an entertaining talk about what possibilities this offers at this year's PyCon.

  6. G2
    Flame

    Firefox crashiness

    they'll add the full IDE before or after fixing the crashiness that's been plaguing Firefox lately?

    since v29 i get at least a crash a day.. i got into the habit of no longer bothering with providing comments in the Crash Reporter... i use that for ASCII art

    If you happen to navigate to about:crashes in Firefox.. you'll get there a nice list of Firefox crashes on the local PC that have been caught by the Crash Reporter, crashes complete with URLs to the crash analysis and the comments neatly formatted on a page... you can see that people swear a lot in crash comments too.. i just use a small piece of ASCII art for comments and i see some other people doing that too :)

    ......................../´¯/)

    .....................,/¯..//

    ..................../..../ /

    ............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸

    ........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\

    ........('(...´(..´......,~/'...')

    .........\.................\/..../

    ..........\............... _.·´

    ............\..............(

    ..............\.............\

    edit: meh, elReg is messing with the newlines in the above graphic, doubling them.. just use your imagination and remove the extra spacing (^_^)

    1. MrWibble

      Re: about:crashes

      According to that page, my last crash was in 2009 (and I use Firefox daily). So I’d suggest it's something you've screwed up on your system.

      1. G2

        Re: about:crashes

        Firefox is the only program that crashes on either of my systems and the crashes started with v29.. it was pretty stable before that, and i'm not the only one that started to see crashes beginning with v29.

        system 1: Win7 SP1 x64 fully updated, installed in 2011, 16 gb ram

        system 2: winxp sp3, fully updated, including the POS, 4gb ram (3gb usable), freshly installed in january 2014

        On both systems i always run as normal user without admin rights and i use an elevated command window when i need administrative access.

        again.. Firefox is the only program that's crashing... since it doesnt do that for you.. do you use any add-ons?

        Maybe it's because i'm using NoScript / AdBlock Plus / HTTPS Everywhere, but these add-ons worked just fine before v29 appeared and they've been updated repeatedly since v29 was launched.

        1. Chemist

          Re: about:crashes

          "Firefox is the only program that crashes on either of my systems"

          I don't know what your problem is. I have a very similar setup on 6 computers ( although running Linux rather than Windows) and crashes are very few to none. You could try deleting your profile although that can be a bit of a pain

        2. MrWibble

          Re: about:crashes

          "again.. Firefox is the only program that's crashing... since it doesnt do that for you.. do you use any add-ons?"

          Got about 20 add-ons active at present (and another 15 or so deactivated). But as the poster above, I'm on Linux, so maybe it's just a bit crap on Windows?

        3. Gene Cash Silver badge

          Re: about:crashes

          Yup, since I "upgraded" to v29, Firefox on my Linux machines and my Windows machines have all started crashing several times a day. I switched back to v26 and it stopped.

      2. RISC OS

        Re: about:crashes

        My firefox never crashes... sounds indeed like it is your fault

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So, this is the lot that claim allowing users to have the choice of the pre-Australis UI is too much work?

    And, no, there are no add-ons that revert it sufficiently.

  8. i1ya

    I don't want to offend any of Firefox fans here (while also being one of them), but Chromium already has very IDE-like web developer tools. It allows remote debugging via USB (it's very comfortable to use inspector and console on PC to debug web app on a small tablet), mapping of remote resources to local directory (although buggy or I didn't figured out how to do it right), grepping in several files. If you will detach dev tools window, you will see that its Source panel looks exactly as IDE. And much less buggier than latest Firefox dev tools. And yes, Firefox' tools do crash. I develop a complex Javascript app and Firefox with dev tools open crashes on my Debian (sid) system every hour! (and sometimes I receive messages about hanging script in its CodeMirror). Also it has quite poor keyboard shortcuts and is less customisable than Chrome's. But having said that, Fx' tools are quite young and in Firefox we also have a Firebug as one of the options. And also it's not ethical to bash a non-profit Mozilla for trying to make our life better - let's not criticise but help :)

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