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Comment by dismalaf | Hacker News Reader

> web browser was also an editor

Ummmm all the browsers I know of are also editors... Are there any that aren't?

Edit - does no one use dev tools anymore? No HTML? No vanilla JS and CSS? Everyone just using TS, React and gluing things together? Like, you literally have an entire IDE in your browser (assuming you use anything derived from Chrome, Firefox or Safari) that can code a web page live...

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You're describing built-in developer tools for editing local files during development. The comment you're replying to is describing the vision of a browser which can edit remote files as part of the normal user workflow, not as a developer-only activity.

NeXT machines were hardly mass market user machines... They were almost exclusively developer machines.

Also Chrome does have stuff like SSH extensions.

That being said, some of the computing paradigms of the 80's and early 90's were very cool and I wish they caught on... Lisp machines, Smalltalk, early web ideas were interesting...

DevTools was not part of the original browsers. Firebug brought the concept to existence in the first place.

As a sidenote, does manipulating forms count as editing?

>Firebug brought the concept to existence in the first place.

There were other browser "dev tools" before firebug.

https://www.otsukare.info/2020/08/06/browser-devtools-timeli...

Crazy - I had forgotten about the earlier ones! The IE one I used at some point, and fiddler too

I still use Fiddler. I prefer it to browser inspector network tab when I need to get into the weeds. It does so much, and I can write custom proxy tweaks with Javascript (actually JScript.NET, but works just like good old JS), and it works with other software, I use it with NodeJS all the time. It's like the Swiss army knife of HTTP.

Netscape had a JavaScript debugger, IE had a debugger as well. What firebug did was pull the inspector, debugger, console, and everything together in a really nice dev experience. The goal posts were moved far back and the major browsers hurriedly released their “dev tools” to counter FireBug. Chrome being the first after, followed shortly by Safari (who already had an inspector). It would take MS another 6 years to do the same for IE8.

Netscape had editing tools. Firefox has editing tools. Chrome has editing tools. I think Safari does too?

Like, Netscape Composer came OUT of Navigator...

They are talking about a WYSIWYG editor like Netscape Composer

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