[thegeomaster]

>No this is not bullshit, because developers are users and some users turn into developers BECAUSE they poke around tools available to them.

And by moving the web IDE to a separate add-on, we make it unavailable to them?

It's just more easily available. That's a huge difference. You have a web browser, you ask yourself, "how do I create webpages?" Then you maybe Google how to do it, and the answer says "it's in Firefox, just press F12", or "get this Firefox add-on, and then press F12". The difference is negligible.

If someone was to stumble across some HTML via "View Source", the result would be essentially the same as above. If someone opened the web IDE out of curiosity, she would still need to know how to use it. Tinkering only gets you so far, it's a combination of tinkering and researching that makes you learn new stuff. And if you do even a modicum of research on that, you'd learn that there's an IDE in Firefox, or that there's an add-on for Firefox.

Talents show up, one way or another. How likely is it that this particular decomposition of a monolithic application into a core application and an add-on would make some talented kid never discover their passion? I'd say it's highly unlikely. But how likely it is that a huge amount of users would need to download bigger archives of the browser, or bigger updates, or suffer from some form of bloat if the IDE was included? I'd say more likely.

New developers have been emerging since the dawn of computing, without any thought given to whether or not including something would allow some kid to poke around and discover that he likes to do it. Why would it stop now?

[yeukhon]

As a developer, I like native integration. Why should an operating system bundle media player if they can just download a media player on their own using a browser? How many people start to play a video as soon as they get a new computer? A 5 minute research is enough to find out a variety of good media player.

In fact, OS bundle media player sucks because they can only play some formats. I shall say it sucks that we have so many different codec available and yet OS can only bundle a small subset of the free codec (forget about the one that are proprietary).

And you know what? This integration is done. It's in nightly. It probably won't be removed for a long time because it's a feature that has a use case. You don't have to like it, but it's in there.

I don't know about you, but sometimes the things I dislike turn out all right and I like them later because I start to use them.

Also, I own multiple copies and multiple profile of Firefox for development purpose (and testing purpose). I am not sure whether there is a global way to make add-on available across profile, but at least I don't know how and I don't want to re-install the same add-on five times a day. Minor use case but it's a use case.

Also, when I teach programming to students, I and the class can benefit from a single installation. Just need Firefox! I don't need to worry about different IDE and I can focus on showing them the result in the same browser they use to see live code and debug code. I don't use fancy IDE and I hate full blown IDE for web app.

This integration makes me happy, makes some of us happy and that's how a software is. You don't have to like this decision, but it's in there, so try it when you have a chance and you may like it.