Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Teases First Browser Dedicated To Devs
hypnosec writes Mozilla has teased a browser for developers — a first of its kind — in a bid to equip developers with a set of tools at one place for better and enhanced productivity. Speaking about the perils of web development Mozilla says engineers, while building for the web, use a range of tools that don't always work well together. Because of this, they have to switch between platforms. This process of switching from one platform to another makes a developer less productive, Mozilla says. The not-for-profit organization hasn't detailed its browser for developers to a great extent, but has revealed that the browser will be available on November 10.
Unless it can run multiple browser engines I'm not sure how much application switching it will prevent.
It's kind of amusing this should show up today, the same day I discovered a somewhat amusing little issue with the Firefox developer tools:
The "JavaScript error" developer console log messages (e.g., JavaScript errors) are not necessarily displayed in the same order that "JavaScript console" messages (i.e., console.log) are generated.
Meaning that if you're trying to track down what's generating a JavaScript message in some library you're calling (that is, a warning because the library "helpfully" catches the error for you and just does nothing), you: 1) can't get a stack trace of where that message was generated and 2) can't rely on "console.log" statements to help you narrow it down since "console.log" messages can be out of order of any other message type. I have no idea why this would be the case since JavaScript execution is explicitly single-threaded and having messages generated by a single thread appear out-of-order makes absolutely no sense, but - well, Firefox managed it.
I did, eventually, figure out a solution to my problem: I used Chrome instead. Not only did my app run twice as fast, Chrome messages are in order and included the property being read off the null object. (Allowing me to track down how the library managed to find a null off a non-null argument.)
So I'm glad Firefox is trying to make a "developer-centric browser," now if only their current browser tools weren't terrible.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What leaks? I've yet to see them since I switch back to FF. I've had this session open for several days, I'm presently at 330mb with three tabs. The most I remember seeing this session (last night, in fact) is 670mb though I don't remember how many tabs I had open at the time.
I think the memory leak meme has outlived reality...
Required reading for internet skeptics
But this is for developers, not for designers that want to pretend that they are developing.
I write code in the editor of my choice, then I open chrome and look at my results.
Presumably as you continue to tweak the code, you have to save and wait for the browser to notice one of the source files has changed. An IDE like browser could update live and instantly from memory, every time the source changes to something legally parsable.
And of course browsers already have built in developer tools, and/or plugins. But there's so much more that's possible.
What leaks? [...] I think the memory leak meme has outlived reality...
That just means it's gone gold, as far as Internet memes are concerned. If an Internet "meme" can remain in usage past the natural lifespan or the relevance of its subject, some people mistakenly think that makes it funny.
grumble, grumble Al Gore invented the Internet @(&*@) The Internet is ... a series of tubes *&^^$%^)*#@ 640k[i]B is enough memory for anyone #$@#$@*& BSD is dying !$%#@#)
There aren't just one or two people reporting memory leaks with Firefox. There are lots of people reporting these problems, even if some people don't experience them.
I don't think it's a "meme". I don't think it's people trolling. I see these comments all over the place online. I hear of similar experiences in person from co-workers, friends and relatives. This comes up far too much to just be a coincidence.
When people are reporting that fresh installations of the most recent version of Firefox end up consuming multiple gigabytes of memory after moderate browsing, then something is clearly wrong. Maybe it isn't broken on your system, and maybe it isn't broken on the systems of the Firefox developers, but it's apparently broken on the systems of a great many end users.
Yet instead of doing the responsible thing and accepting that there is in fact some sort of a problem, members of the Mozilla community (such as yourself) end up denying the problem exists, and then you ridicule everyone who does suffer from it. Sometimes you blame it on "extensions", even when the users are using a fresh installation of Firefox without any installed!
Responding to what's very likely a completely real problem in that manner only drives users away from Firefox. That's part of the reason why Firefox is only at around 10% of the browser market at this time, with that number continually dropping. It's because Mozilla doesn't listen to the users any longer, and the wider Mozilla community treats many other Firefox users with complete disrespect.
Users don't want to deal with bugs like memory leaks in the first place, and users don't want to deal with a hostile response when they report such problems. They'll just go and use Chrome instead, which doesn't even suffer from these problems in the first place, and which is also really easy to download and install.
Instead of responding how you just did, you and others in the Mozilla community need to acknowledge that this problem exists, acknowledge that others may be affected by it even if you aren't, and you need to try to help find a solution to these problems that doesn't involve ridicule and denial.
If Mozilla and the greater Mozilla community doesn't change their ways, then we won't be talking about how Firefox is only at 10% of the market. We'll be talking about how Firefox is at 3% of the market, assuming Mozilla still even exists as an organization at that point.
developers
developers
developers
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
HTML, JS, CSS are all W3C standards, so why should a web developer care what software the user browses with?
For at least three reasons.
First, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are at times underspecified. Touch screen and mouse-and-keyboard devices send events in different orders on different platforms. Differences in font rendering cause a particular CSS box to have different heights on different platforms. Differences in 2D canvas antialiasing and image resizing algorithms cause the output of an identical script to have subtly different appearances. Different support different audiovisual codecs: Safari requires MPEG codecs whereas third-party browsers often require royalty-free codecs. And different browsers for small-screen devices have different triggers to disable desktop-width document layout.
Second, user agents are free not to implement certain parts of the standard at all. Older browsers are unlikely to implement new standards, requiring use of polyfills. Some browsers require prefixes for specific CSS properties and values and JavaScript objects. Some omissions appear deliberate, designed to sway web developers toward the device manufacturer's (paid and OCD-curated) native app developer program. For instance, <input type="file"> wasn't implemented in Safari for iOS (or any of the other browsers in the App Store, which are all Safari wrappers) until iOS 6, and as I understand it, it still doesn't work for any content type other than pictures and videos. WebGL still doesn't work in web pages on iOS.
Even among parts of the standards that a user agent does implement, quality of implementation varies. One browser's JavaScript JIT might execute a particular construction quickly, another not so quickly. WebGL might work on some underlying video drivers but not others.
That would be like picking on a disabled kid.