Mozilla announced that they are excited to unveil Firefox Developer Edition, the first browser created specifically for developers that integrates two powerful new features, Valence and WebIDE that improve workflow and help you debug other browsers and apps directly from within Firefox Developer Edition. Valence (previously called Firefox Tools Adapter) lets you develop and debug your app across multiple browsers and devices by connecting the Firefox dev tools to other major browser engines. WebIDE allows you to develop, deploy and debug Web apps directly in your browser, or on a Firefox OS device. "It lets you create a new Firefox OS app (which is just a web app) from a template, or open up the code of an existing app. From there you can edit the app’s files. It’s one click to run the app in a simulator and one more to debug it with the developer tools."
Firefox Developer Edition also includes all the tools experienced Web developers are familiar with including: Responsive Design Mod, Page Inspector, Web Console, JavaScript Debugger, Network Monitor, Style Editor, and Web Audio Editor. At launch, Mozilla is starting off with Chrome for Android and Safari for iOS. and the eventual goal is to support more browsers, depending on what developers tell Mozilla they want, but the primary focus is on the mobile Web. "One of the biggest pain points for developers is having to use numerous siloed development environments in order to create engaging content or for targeting different app stores. For these reasons, developers often end up having to bounce between different platforms and browsers, which decreases productivity and causes frustration," says the press release. "If you’re a new Web developer, the streamlined workflow and the fact that everything is already set up and ready to go makes it easier to get started building sophisticated applications."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lagg on Monday November 10 2014, @08:22PM
It's not the first browser built for developers by far, nor is it anything novel but that's really a good thing. I was kind of worried that Mozilla was wasting yet more money and other resources on something that didn't need doing but this is just a rebrand basically that includes some experimental developers tools (that we can already install separately) and some about:config preferences that usually must be toggled manually already set. That's all. I wish they'd have spent time working on firefox as a whole and cleaning things up but really it's the lesser of the two evils. For a while I really was worried that the media stupidity and hype would end up being correct and Mozilla actually did write an entirely new browser.
I know you generally don't care about what people that aren't on slashdot say, Hugh, but in the event you do please don't worry about the length of your summaries. You're making this sound like an advertisement. It's okay to have one quick paragraph.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Monday November 10 2014, @08:30PM
If you mean by making it more stable, better memory management, and less Chrome-like, I agree. Thank the heavens for the more traditional Pale Moon [palemoon.org] browser.
I was happy to see a list of what components are included. Two paragraphs are fine.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday November 10 2014, @08:36PM
I tried using pale moon for a while but for some reason the inspector had horrific slowdown issues and was missing a lot. It was great from a standard user standpoint but they really need to focus on the other stuff.
Also the first paragraph had the new stuff that was included, everything he said in the second was redundant and a list of tools that already exist in 33.0.3. Otherwise the big things of note are Valance and WebIDE. That's it.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1) by novak on Monday November 10 2014, @09:07PM
Yeah, my first thought was that moving their focus from the UI to things that more competent users might want is a good thing; Firefox has gone steadily downhill in their mad race to become chrome 2.0. But I think it's pretty funny that they have a developer edition which is basically just changing defaults and installing a couple things developers might want, but they don't have something similar for the standard users who hate the new UI. Who's more likely to have trouble changing a few settings? A developer, or some relatively non-computer literate user who wants to know what just barfed on their browser?
So to summarize: Mozilla continues to focus on cosmetic changes for people who don't need them instead of addressing the performance issues in their browser.
novak
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday November 10 2014, @10:26PM
in their mad race to become chrome 2.0
There's a joke in there somewhere, considering that Chrome is already on version 38.0...
(yeah, I know what you were getting at)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday November 10 2014, @10:59PM
Yeah but when you are already bleeding to death [sitepoint.com] that is like saying "Oh I thought they were gonna add slit wrists on top and instead its only a dozen or so paper cuts!"
The Firefox numbers have been dropping like an arrow in almost a perfect down curve for a couple years now and talking to folks on various forums it seems to be that a huge chunk of the Firefox users are jumping ship and never coming back. The consensus is that the devs refuse to listen to the users, keep making FF into a Chrome with shitty threading so folks either jump ship to one of the more sane gecko browsers like PaleMoon (my choice as a backup browser), IceDragon, or Seamonkey, or they jump ship completely and go to the other side with Chrome, Chromium, or one of the two Comodo Chromium variants like Dragon or Comodo Secure Chromium. No matter which they switch to the one thing they all seem to agree on is that they will NOT be coming back, the Moz devs done burned that bridge.
My personal feelings on the matter is that the Moz devs done lost their way, they have forgotten their mission statement and instead are acting like Google and throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks without having Google money to waste on a path like that. anybody remember what the stated goal was when they asked everybody to switch from Moz Suite to Phoenix or whatever it was called then? It was "to make the best, fastest, most lightweight standards compliant browser possible"...well anybody who has used ANY of the Chromium variants knows they failed in that regard, as a single bad page can bring FF to its knees, its really bad about slamming a core during load, which makes it suck more power on mobile devices, and its a hel of a lot more likely to suffer a lock up or a crash than the others in my experience. But instead of listening to the users, giving them a decent UI, fixing performance, and making FF a joy to use what do we get? Moz OS, an OS made to run apps based on HTML V5...snicker...on low powered devices...BWA HA HA HA HA, sorry but that is like taking the engine from a hummer and stuffing it into a Trabant, HTML V5 is a resource hog, several projects that came and went like MozTV and now MozDev....how is any of this gonna stop the bleeding of users? Its not.
remember the ONLY way Moz stays afloat is if they keep enough users for Google to throw a mountain of money at them for the rights to the default search and if they keep bleeding users at the rate they have the past 2 years by the time the next bidding round comes by they'll be lucky if they can get ask to give em $50k for the rights. as somebody who was once a total diehard Mozzer, going from the first suite all the way through the beta and even weathering the mess that was the 2x/3x leakage mess? I'd really hate to see Mozilla drop off the face of the world but its probably been 6 months since I seen a system with a FF installed grace my desk, its all Chrome with some PaleMoon or variants. The new UI has gone over about as well as Metro and the sooner they admit that and put in the work on seriously wooing users back the better, because if they don't I wouldn't be surprised to see FF go the way of the suite and become this little tiny community that most mainstream users don't even know exists.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 11 2014, @01:16AM
Those stats are suspect. They put Firefix at 17% of the desktop market. The data I've seen put the number much lower, down around 10% of the market.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday November 10 2014, @08:59PM
With Firebug, wasn't Firefox already the browser for developers? Other than inspecting your DOM and being able to run arbitrary JavaScript, what else is there? The other features don't look particularly compelling to me, nothing I can't already do, and I would never want to develop web applications in a browser.
Firefox has bigger problems than trying to develop tools no one needs. I wish they would back out of version 29's user interface disaster, put the buttons back on the toolbar where they used to be, put Viiew/Page Source back where it used to be, and quit randomly jumbling their user interface every few months. Shoot FirefoxOS and put it out of its misery. I have never read anything good about it in years, and I was the internal champion of developing an HTML5 codebase but kept getting shot down. Go back to your core strength, Firefox 4, and build a decent browser. Leave the web page development to us.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday November 10 2014, @10:29PM
I already use Chrome Dev Tools today which comes built into Chrome. It pretty much allows me to link all source content loaded by the browser to my local resources served up by my dev web server locally. Basically I can edit the source directly in Chrome and debug and my web server will detect those changes and re-host the new resources automatically
I can style content and see it in effect in Chrome, navigate and manipulate the DOM in realtime, debug and profile network and ajax loads. The editor, debugger, profiler is a 1st class citizen in Chrome unlike 3rd party IDEs like WebStorm or VisualStudio where I have to attach them to Chrome like a parasite and breaks now and then with new versions. Of course this limits your work and dev testing to Chrome, but it suits for my use case (may not for yours so go figure out something else - I'm not preaching this as the be all end all for web devs).
The editor is probably not as fancy as others, but having done development in vi(m) and pico in my early years pretty much set me up to tolerate any editor (except maybe emacs :))
Looking at the linked article, this doesn't do much beyond what I've described above apart from adding additional support for Firefox OS and developing apps for those.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 12 2014, @06:28PM
I've been doing those exact same things in Firefox since before Chrome even existed. This is bigger.
The thing that has me excited here is the ability to emulate different browsers. I regularly use Firefox and Chrome under Linux, then I have some VMs for IE and older FF/Chrome versions, then I've gotta try to run an OS X vm on a Linux host to test in Safari, which is a goddamn *nightmare*. If I was actually getting paid for these websites I'd probably be doing even more. Maybe even tablets, phones, etc. If I can get even halfway decent emulation of other browsers within Firefox, that's going to simplify development *immensely*!
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Monday November 10 2014, @10:55PM
Looks like they didn't. I'd expect a serious program to have a serious interface that isn't actively trying to rip off the godawful UI employed by its competitor. I suppose that assumptions change though. Oh well.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday November 11 2014, @09:53AM
That is all.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 1) by radu on Tuesday November 11 2014, @11:26AM
Thank you Mozilla! I can finally do all my developing on my tablet!
And in the near future even on my phone - phones with 4k displays can't be that far away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 11 2014, @01:04PM
Does Firefox OS even run on tablets and phones?
I've heard that some people have tried it, but it is generally a disaster.
(Score: 1) by radu on Tuesday November 11 2014, @01:14PM
Actually I didn't even bother to look before I wrote. Did that now, seems it's only a few phones at the moment
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/devices/ [mozilla.org]