WebIDE: an IDE built into Firefox Nightly for developers

The latest versions of Mozilla Firefox has incorporated a lot of changes for the user with Australis, and improvements in social networks with various services that keep us updated without leaving the application.

But the best changes to my consideration have never been for the end user, but for the developers. With the departure of Firefox OS, Mozilla has been incorporating new tools integrated into the browser that make our lives easier when creating, testing and installing applications.

En Firefox Nightly A new tool has been added, or rather, an evolution of the Application Manager (App Manager) which has been an IDE for the Web, or so they call it: WebIDE.

What is WebIDE?

The first thing we will see is how to activate it. I think it is not necessary to clarify that it is only available in the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox (Nightly). To do this we open a window and type: about: config. There we look for the parameter devtools.webide.enabled and we activate it by putting it in true.

WebIDE

Click on the image to see the GIF

Then we will Tools »Application Manager and what we will see is something like this:

Web_IDE

With WebIDE We can work on an application already installed, or create ours from scratch:

Web_IDE1

To better see how it works, I leave you a video:

Now, after trying WebIDE for a while, I can see that Mozilla can do something interesting with this tool:

  1. Remove it from the browser. If they make WebIDE as a standalone, I think it would save a lot of weight within Mozilla Firefox.
  2. If they make it an external App, apart, a new Text Editor (or IDE, depending on it) could be born to compete against Atom, Sublime Text and Brackets.

Web_IDE

Of course, for now they would have to go a little further and that WebIDE works not only for specific applications and that it has autocompletion for HTML, JS y JSON well for CSS he already has it.


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  1.   moony said

    finally the bracket competitor is in sight !! I opted for sublime text even though every 3 or 4 hours (or 50 "ctrl + s") he asked me to buy it.
    Hopefully they put the autocomplete for html even if it is.

  2.   pandev92 said

    How good it looks running in osx 🙁

  3.   dwarf said

    I like the idea but personally I don't see a need for another IDE or another code editor. We already have Sublime, Atom, Brackets, Lightable and this weird IDE from Google that is cool to work with JS and its API's because it autocompletes them and brings documentation if I remember correctly (otherwise it is nothing special).

    I think Mozilla should focus on what the FxOS app-manager is doing well and that if it wants to work with WebIDE, do something else like a bundle of snippets, autocompletion and stuff with the FxOS API for Atom Sublime and Brackets, in the long run they work out better.

    1.    elav said

      Well for me the more options the better. Period. 😛

      1.    dwarf said

        Oh no, then the versionitis hits me and no, better not xD

    2.    auroszx said

      What I see in particular is that it allows modifying applications already installed, and that it is integrated into Firefox. Come on, that Firefox is literally the absolute Devtool for Firefox OS (which is logical).
      Although, at the security level, I am a little concerned about the risk that may be involved in giving write permissions in Firefox OS to a PC tool, because it can send the sandboxes and the identification by UUID to the m ***** and cause some damage (theoretically speaking). We will see what they do about it.

  4.   Nuker said

    In fact, including this within Firefox does not slow it down.

    Developer tools are not loaded unless they are being used, for non-users there is no performance impact. The size of the code (on disk) in the executable is miniscule.

  5.   Angel said

    Well, devtools.webide.enabled doesn't appear to me and I have the latest version….

  6.   Bryan horna vasquez said

    Hopefully this new alternative will emerge 🙂 In Ubuntu I am already tired that the only alternative that promises is WebStorm, because Brackets does not help much in terms of CSS selectors, Sublime Text not to mention because it is only a code editor, Atom apart that takes time to compile I see it as an opensource copy of Sublime Text, Aptana can still do fine ...
    Really, hopefully Mozilla will get on with it and launch itself into this world of IDEs.

  7.   Anonymous said

    THE REALLY TRUTH I don't understand any of that, for me it is left over