SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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*!