Orion in Firefox

Article published on:12 August 2011, 19:15

Hello world!

Just a quick note: today we have landed the Orion editor in Firefox. If all things go well, users will play with Orion in the new Scratchpad developer tool in Firefox 8.

Implementation and integration notes: only the Orion TextView is used and for now this feature is disabled by default due to some bugs with bidirectional text support and accessibility issues. We are looking into improving the code so we can later enable Orion by default. This will happen after Firefox 8.

To enable Orion you need to go to about:config and change devtools.editor.component to "orion".

An obligatory screen shot and screen cast:

I did the screen cast one month ago. The only changes since then are code quality improvements, bug fixes and minor UI improvements.

Big thanks go to the awesome Orion team for their great project and fruitful collaboration, and to the Mozilla colleagues who had the patience to review all the code I wrote: Robert Campbell, Gavin Sharp and Ehsan Akhgari.

Have fun! Play with tomorrow's Firefox nightly builds or... wait for the Firefox 8 alpha/beta/stable release (whichever you prefer).

If you want gory technical details, just check out the bug reports where all the work was done: bug 636727 and bug 660784.

Published in: devtools, eclipse, firefox, ibm, mozilla, orion, scratchpad.