Mozilla released Firefox Quantum while both Visual Studio Code and Atom introduce live code collaboration.

Firefox Quantum

Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox, that they hope will breath life back into the platform: Firefox Quantum. While it is still more popular than Opera, the over 30% market share it had in 2009 has dropped to less than 10% as many have switched to Chrome. A big part of this no doubt due to mobile usage where Chrome is the undisputed leader¹, but even on the desktop this is the case.

As many others, I myself turned away from Firefox years ago when it became slow and started using far too much memory. Over time, a lot of this was rectified, but the release of Quantum seems to have taken this further than before. Statements like it being twice as fast and now using 30% less memory than Chrome are obvious attempts to get people to use it again. Because I was curious I gave it a bit of a spin and it certainly seems fast. I don’t know if the interface is new as I haven’t used it this much for a long time, but it looks nice. I also didn’t encounter any issues with rendering on the sites I visited, but I haven’t really used it in anger either. All in all, it looks like a good improvement, but for now I’ll stick with my existing combination of Safari and Chrome.

Live Code Collaboration

Almost at the same time, both Atom and Visual Studio Code introduced a way to collaborate on code by way of letting others load up your project in their own editor. Especially for remote teams this seems like a very nice way of either doing pair programming or helping each other out while debugging.

While both editors came out with a solution at the same time, and they are both built with Electron, the solutions are quite different. Atom offers a plugin called Teletype while Visual Studio Code has something called Visual Studio Live Share. I couldn’t find out if Live Share will be a plugin or a standard included functionality, but based on the demo it will work with both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code with the ability to work in each other. Neither editor believes their solution is ready yet. Teletype is currently marked as beta and Live Share will soon open up for a limited US-only preview². Live Share seems to have more capabilities, but that could also be a matter of having a better demo video.

The way it works for both editors is that you can create a URL or code for sharing and this will create direct connection between the people sharing and joining. Live Share seems to do this by way of an Azure relay³ while Teletype sets up a peer-to-peer connection. Once the connection is set up, all parties can simultaneously edit the project. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but it sounds like a good system and I can definitely see an advantage in using it. Follow the above links for some demos to see if it might be useful to you.