[gbadman]

Hi Paul,

What I understood from your article is that you're mostly exploring 1) the possibility of opening up the dev tools to locally-installed applications like SublimeText2; and 2) the integration of jsFiddle-like apps within DevTools.

Please correct me if I misunderstood.

What I'm asking about is creating an in-browser API for a website to interact with the dev tools. Obviously, this would require a very thorough review of the risks of having such an API from a security perspective (and how users can opt-in in a transparent and well-controlled manner). That being said, I am still hoping!

If this is already in the books, then Hooray! I can't wait to start experimenting.

I hope I didn't come across poorly, because I really appreciate all the work you've been doing!

[paulrouget]

So - Firefox exposes a tcp-based protocol (not enabled by default. The user will need to go to a special tool to start the server). It will expose feature like adding break points, exploring the DOM and the CSS rules, and editing content (CSS/HTML/JS).

So external tools can connect to Firefox. But this protocol is not accessible from a page. But we could imagine using a websocket instead of a normal tcp socket, and let the web page connect to ws://localhost.

[gbadman]

Paul, very cool indeed.

Stretch goal: How about having an in-browser API that could create such a websocket?

That would open some interesting possibilities in terms of remote debugging by piping socket traffic over another socket/WebRTC datachannel as well as allowing websites to interact with the debugger.

[past]

Allowing websites to interact with the Debugger API is something we would like to do, but, as you note, the security implications require much more thought to get it right.