Do you believe the Firefox project should be forked into a developer targeted version?

Question

I've just got this idea that there is a need for a forked version of Firefox that would provide right out of the box tools for web development. Like FireBug, YSlow, FireCookie, LiveHTTPHeaders, etc.

Maybe the fork should only include those extensions or take a further step and implement them in existing chrome.

The reason I'm thinking about this is that right now I have two Firefox profiles. A "browsing" one which has only one extension and a "development" one which has lots and lots of extensions. The advantage is obviously that the former is faster than the latter. Maybe if aimed from the beginning at developers, a forked version would bring some speed improvements and other niceties.

What do you think? Any volunteers?

Answer 1

Adding functionality to FireFox via extensions is IMO the reason why it is such a popular browser. If you take that freedom 'away' from people by providing them 'pre-baked' solutions, that will not be for the best.

Answer 2

What advantage would that give over extensions? You don't actually believe, that someone will port code to C?

Answer 3

I fear that pulling mentioned extensions into an official, maybe even Mozilla-branded, distribution would cause a slowdown in the development of those extensions because their authors would have to worry about coordinating their development with the provider of the browser distribution.

Answer 4

You can always prepare your own Firefox installator...

Answer 5

I think it is unnecessary to fork for that, because you can both things already - that is, have multiple profiles, and have all the developer tools as extensions.

You could even install two different profiles and run them from two different executables (portable Firefox makes this easy) allowing you to have a completely different plugin set as well as extension set for both.

Answer 6

Thinking about this more, I can't see how it would help.

Say you fork Firefox into a dev version, that is then used by extension developers.

But what is the target platform? The dev-platform (okay, then) or the "standard" platform -- if the latter, they aren't using it, and so dev and testing be be doubled or worse. Just imaging targetting Gnu Emacs but doing the dev in XEmacs.

Develop and test on your target platform, or face unpleasant surprises....