← Back to context

Comment by lproven

1 day 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.

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

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.

  • 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.