A few months ago Mozilla released its WebIDE project to make the browser a complete environment not just for consuming Web apps but for developing and deploying them as well. At the time, though, WebIDE had a gap: Web applications generally have to run in a range of browsers, and WebIDE only worked with Firefox and Firefox OS.
With a new add-on released today, WebIDE is going cross platform. The catchily named "Firefox Developer Tool Adaptor" lets Firefox connect to Chrome (both on the desktop and on Android) and Safari (on iOS) remotely, enabling developers to use the Firefox development environment to debug apps running on those other browsers.
Specifically, Web devs will be able to use Firefox's JavaScript debugger, DOM inspector, and CSS editor with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Each browser has its own remote debugging protocol, and the add-on translates from those "foreign" protocols back to Firefox's own built-in remote debugging protocol.
Mozilla hopes that this will make developers' lives much easier, letting them stick with one set of tools while still testing and debugging across different platforms. This recognizes an important aspect of Web development. As much as Web apps are meant to be cross-platform and browser-independent, testing in different browsers and addressing the little annoyances and problems that occur in them remains a core part of the Web development experience.
The company says that future development of the add-on will be guided by developer feedback, with possible future features including wider browser support (Internet Explorer is currently not supported, for example), or richer capabilities such as JavaScript and WebGL performance profiling.
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