On 31/08/17 19:42, Jim Blandy wrote:
Some possibly missing context: Mozilla Devtools wants to see this
implemented for our own use. After much discussion last summer in
London, the Firefox Devtools team decided to adopt the Chrome Debugging
Protocol for the console and the JavaScript debugger. (The cases for
converting the other tools like the Inspector are less compelling.)
Speaking as the designer of Firefox's protocol, the CDP is a de-facto
standard. The Firefox protocol really has not seen much uptake outside
Mozilla, whereas the Chrome Debugging Protocol is implemented with
varying degrees of fidelity by several different browsers. "Proprietary"
is not the right term here, but in the sense of "used nowhere else", one
could argue that it is Mozilla that is using the proprietary protocol,
not Chrome. In a real sense, it is more consistent with Mozilla's
mission for us to join the rest of the community, implement the CDP for
the tools where it makes sense, and participate in its standardization,
than to continue to push a protocol nobody else uses.
I entirely agree that the current Firefox protocol is also proprietary.
However I also assumed that it's considered an internal implementation
detail rather than something we would expect people to interoperate
with. If that wasn't the case then I apologise: I should have complained
earlier :)
Going forward, if we implement a "de-facto" standard that is not
actually standardised, we are assuming a large risk, in addition to the
problems around our stated values. An obvious concern is that Google are
free to change the protocol as they like, including in ways that are
intentionally or accidentally incompatible with other implementations.
We also know from past experience of implementing "de-facto" standards
that implementation differences end up hardcoded into third party
consumers (i.e. web pages in the case of DOM APIs), making it impossible
to get interoperability without causing intolerable short-term breakage.
This has prevented standardisation and compatibility of "de-facto"
standards like innerText and contentEditable, which remain nominally
equivalent but actually very different in all browsers.
If people are starting to standardise not just the protocol but also the
semantics of CDP, that's great. But people tend to vastly underestimate
how long standardisation will take, and overestimate the resources that
they will find to work on it. So it would be good to see concrete
progress before we are actually shipping.
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