Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lproven 8 days ago
> they don't typically include editing functionality.

Not true. The original Mozilla Internet Suite was a combined browser, email/newsgroups client, and web-page editor. It was an open-sourced version of Netscape Communicator which did the same things. Seamonkey is the modern fork.

Firefox is the result of a project to cut down the Mozilla suite to something smaller, simpler and more focused, but its parent program and direct ancestor edited text, HTML, and did other read/write stuff like messaging, calendaring, etc.
2 comments
mikae1 8 days ago
The first web browser was also an editor (albeit not for PDFs). Accessible editing was a part of was Berners-Lee's vision for the web.

> The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web.[1]

[1] https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

link
yjftsjthsd-h 8 days ago
I stand by the statement. Modern browsers typically do not include all that functionality. For instance, consider... well, as you say - Firefox supposedly was the cut down version that didn't include all that stuff. If Mozilla wants to make seamonkey a major part of their product suite, I'd be basically on board with that, but that thing's niche.
link
tosti 8 days ago
It's an editor, just one that you can program in JavaScript.

Remember WordPerfect? When you press F12 in Firefox, you have essentially the same thing as the reveal codes pane in WP.

link