Everyone does deserve access to built-in, high-quality tools. And everyone already gets that, with all major browsers. No one is taking away the built in developer tools in Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, or Opera. The problem is that they're always just a little bit older than the tip of the current development branch. And that's fine for folks who are starting to teach themselves how to debug web applications. Hell, that's fine for most people, developers included.
But there's a lot of development happening in this space, and sometimes you need access to tools or features that aren't yet stable enough for wide release. So you download Firefox Nightly or Chrome Canary. And you flip on something in about:config or enable experimental web platform features in chrome://flags. And you're off to the races.
That's not dividing the web, and it's not giving different tools to developers versus users. It's trading stability for slightly faster access to new, shiny things.
The announcement promises 'Soon, we’re going to bring you more, a lot more, in a package that you deserve as a builder for an independent Web.' My argument is basically that users deserve these things, too.
With huge respect for the work that you and Mozilla have been doing in this and other areas, I can understand that there are practical reasons why this may make sense for Mozilla (and even developers) internally.
But at least from the announcement, it still sounds like Mozilla is other-ing celebrated 'builders' like us from everyday users and segmenting our means of accessing the 'new, shiny things' you mention.
Thank you for following up. I'm just getting up to speed on what the devtools team has been working on, and it should meet with your approval when it's released.
The other-ing language is unfortunate, but is hopefully tempered by Mozilla's work to ensure that everyone can be a developer. Things like Webmaker, the Web Literacy Standard, Summer Code Parties, the Mozilla Science Lab, etc. Mozilla and Mozillians are pouring an enormous amount of effort into building digital skills and literacy every day. We want to help people understand that the Web is a medium that they can create.
Without spoiling the announcement, I suspect it will be more agreeable than it might appear from this press release. :)
Instead of working to ensure that my parents' computer running Windows 3.1 shipped with a C compiler by default a few decades ago, people inside Microsoft and Borland were probably thinking the same thing.
This line of thinking is basically the reason I had to wait a few more years until I could buy my own computer that could run Linux as a teenager.
For lots of people, the world is a very different place now, but just because something's trivial for people like us doesn't necessarily mean everyone else can very easily 'just download something else'.
Defaults can be tremendously powerful, especially when they enable others to build free software.
> > What's the problem? The users can just download the same browser if they're really interested in the additional functionality.
> Instead of working to ensure that my parents' computer running Windows 3.1 shipped with a C compiler by default a few decades ago, people inside Microsoft and Borland were probably thinking the same thing.
Er, no, they weren't. For Microsoft, they were not thinking users could just download top quality dev tools, in fact that would have been directly contrary to their interests -- they had a profit-based motive for assuring that quality dev tools were a separate purchase. Bundling them into the OS would have required them to sacrifice the additional cost that people making money developing software would be willing to pay for a dev tools .
And Borland was also trying to sell dev tools, but was really irrelevant to what Windows was going to be bundled with.
I agree that defaults are powerful, which is why a potential developer who can't figure out how to download a browser and has nobody around to help will either be using IE or Safari anyway. Anyone who can get a copy of Firefox installed can get another browser installed a LOT more easily than he could figure out how to USE any of the dev features.
The number of potential developers who COULD get Firefox downloaded but COULDN'T figure out how to get a second browser downloaded, yet who COULD figure out how to use the dev features if only they were in Firefox is a tiny fraction of the non-developers who would be confused and annoyed by having dev features they don't want cluttering their interfaces by default.
that's my point: it's clearly not mozilla's fault if everyone doesn't have internet access today or devices that aren't shared with/scrutinized/controlled by others, just like it wasn't redhat or mandrake's fault that the install CDs in computer shopper magazine didn't ship with drivers for my parents' computers a few decades back.
but then, as now, getting started ended up being more complicated for some number of people than it probably seemed to our predecessors at microsoft and borland--including reasons that had little to do with software--but that still could've been influenced by how software development tools were distributed.
maybe it was just me, but getting started is probably still more complicated for some people in the world than either of us can imagine. maybe that's no big deal, but my experience makes me pretty sensitive to access to free software development tools.
Building free software will never be a default mode, simply because building software inherently requires effort. Having the tools in one download or another doesn't appreciably change that.
I think calling IE's development tools high-quality is a stretch. They got nice recently, but by far not as good as those of Chrome or even Firefox. Also it does not help that the development tools in the most recent IE are ok, I still have to maintain/debug older IEs. I think we can probably bin IE8 support, but it think only in recent IE11 the tools got good enough to not be a pain.
Not everyone agrees about IE11, but we are trying to make it better. Better emulation is one place we could do better - I'll shill a bit and call out that we do use our Uservoice [1] to prioritize feature development, so please feel free to add your votes/ideas. I can say that some of these are already in the internal builds :)
I recently had very good luck debugging an IE8 problem with IE11 in emulation mode (via Sauce Labs on my Mac, incidentally). Not sure if it works for everything, but it was by far the best experience I've had with IE.
But if there's a special developer-only Firefox, the dev tools in "regular" Firefox will stop getting new features, will fall out of date, stop providing value, and eventually be removed.
Everyone does deserve access to built-in, high-quality tools. And everyone already gets that, with all major browsers. No one is taking away the built in developer tools in Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, or Opera. The problem is that they're always just a little bit older than the tip of the current development branch. And that's fine for folks who are starting to teach themselves how to debug web applications. Hell, that's fine for most people, developers included.
But there's a lot of development happening in this space, and sometimes you need access to tools or features that aren't yet stable enough for wide release. So you download Firefox Nightly or Chrome Canary. And you flip on something in about:config or enable experimental web platform features in chrome://flags. And you're off to the races.
That's not dividing the web, and it's not giving different tools to developers versus users. It's trading stability for slightly faster access to new, shiny things.