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Comment by lachgr | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a logical development. Firefox gets more and more Developer tools by default, but most users will never touch them. So it sounds logical to exclude Developer tools from the default package and instead offer an Developer version of Firefox.

Firefox is my default browser for a long time (switched briefly to Opera, but when they came with the new Chromium-version I switched back because I didn't like it) and I'm very satisfied with it. The developer tools are getting better and better, and I almost never touch Firebug anymore. Also I like Firefoxs tools more than those of Chrome, but that is a question of taste.

I think there is one thing Firefox can really make better for developers and that is addon development. I personally never developed an addon but looked briefly into it and from what I heard was that in comparison to Chrome, developing for Firefox is difficult. I hope there will be progress on this level too.

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Why a different browser and not just an extension? I feel like different browsers leads to different versions of engines, languages etc. aka a lot of headaches. As a web developer, I want to see what my users see, not what "developers" see..

Well that's how developer tools for Firefox started out as (Firebug), however that was also dependent on a plugin API that gave access to all of those things; by building it in natively, the dev tools have access to all of the APIs, not just the ones exposed by the plugin APIs.

That is not really very relevant when building a Firefox add-on. Firefox add-ons get incredible access privileges to the browser internals. That is part of what makes it hard, but also powerful. An example of what I mean, it was not overly complex for Sunbird (the calender app) to be turned into a add-on. There is no reason also for example that Thunderbird could not be turned into an add-on for Firefox. Except then you would have SeaMonkey...

But my 2c, is that even if the project does not work out as hoped, what ever they are doing can put turned into ad add-on.

I have no idea what Mozilla has been building, but I would guess building a browser from scratch with development in mind gives more possibilities than the most advanced extension for a browser. As long as the rendering engine remains the same as Firefox it wouldn't technically be a "different" browser, just a developer flavoured Firefox.

I think it's great that Mozilla is exploring new territories; it may or may not turn out to be a good idea, but give them the benefit of the doubt, at the end of the day no matter how good web developers tools currently are, without experimentation there would eventually be stagnation.

Actually, this version of Firefox activates a number of web features that are not activated in the release version, to let webdevs test against features that are either not 100% stable or not fully standardized yet.

But other than that, it's basically Firefox.

So it's just like Chrome Canary? Not exactly "the first" then.

Canary is equivalent to https://nightly.mozilla.org/, or http://nightly.webkit.org/

This is different.

It's not revolutionary (we're not releasing Servo yet), but it is pretty fantastic. I'd be shocked if most Firefox Aurora users don't switch over to the developer browser next week. :)

> This is different.

Is it? Sounds like a side-by-side Aurora with a toolbar button for DevTools. No separate feature set AFAICT, but you tell me if I'm wrong.

Well, we have had Firefox Nightly (which is the equivalent of Canary) for, well, as long as we have had Firefox. But activating some experimental features for webdevs is new.

We have no plans to remove the tools from Firefox release.

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