Firefox is turning 10 today and to celebrate, Mozilla is launching a couple of new projects today, including a new privacy initiative and the Firefox Developer Edition, a new version of Firefox that puts the browser’s developer tools front and center.
If you were expecting a revolutionary new browser, you’ll likely be disappointed when you first launch the Developer Edition. It’s essentially Firefox with a new dark theme and square tabs. It includes all of Mozilla’s developer tools that were previously only available as add-ons, including the Firefox Tools Adapter (now called “Valence”) for debugging in Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS, WebIDE for developing web apps in the browser and easier ways to get to the default developer tools already included in the browser.
“Having a dedicated developer browser means we can tailor the browsing experience to what developers do every day,” Mozilla’s director of developer tools, Dave Camp, argues in today’s launch post. He says that developers should not have to “bounce between different platforms and browsers, which decreases productivity and causes frustration.” Instead, the Firefox Developer Edition is meant to solve “this problem by creating a focal point to streamline your development workflow.”
If you’re a developer — or just curious about what a dedicated developer browser would look like — and want to give this new version a try, the good news is that it installs parallel to your existing Firefox install and doesn’t touch it at all.
If you are already on Firefox’s experimental Aurora release channel, by the way, you won’t have to do anything, as the Developer Edition will replace the Aurora channel in the release process.
