Mozilla Delivers Firefox Developer Edition

Mozilla has officially launched Firefox Developer Edition, billing it as “the first browser created specifically for developers.” If developers sound like a very narrowcasted audience to aim a browser at, remember that many of them complain about having to work across numerous platforms and environments and aim for disparate app stores. There are also a lot of them who work in Firefox via tools such as Firebug.

Firefox Developer Edition is targeted to simplify the development process so that applications can be created in a single instance for the desktop, mobile devices and various environments.

Firefox Developer Edition is being released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Firefox browser. Importantly, it also replaces the Aurora channel in the Firefox Release Process. Like Aurora, features will land in the Developer Edition every six weeks, after they have stabilized in Nightly builds. With the Developer Edition, users gain access to tools and platform features at least 12 weeks before they reach the main Firefox release channel.

So what's under the hood? For one thing, there is a Responsive Design Mode that lets developers see how a website or Web app will look on different screen sizes without having to change the size of a browser window. There is also a Page Inspector that lets users peruse the HTML and CSS of any webpage and easily modify its structure or layout.

A Web Console in the Developer Edition shows logged information pertaining to any webpage and provides easy JavaScript access. There is also a simple JavaScript debugger.

According to Mozilla, Firefox Developer Edition uses a separate profile from other Firefox versions installed on a machine. This means you can easily run the Developer Edition alongside any release or Beta version of Firefox.

It's good to see Mozilla moving in this direction. Firebug and other tools used within Firefox have long been popular with developers, but now the browser itself will function as a development environment. 

You can find out what's new in the Developer Edition now.

For more coverage of development tools, see our recent roundup.