create a firefox / chrome addon and add this to the browser dev tools

[skurfuerst]

Hey,

WDYT about packaging this into a Chrome/Firefox web extension? IMHO this would be even better than having to integrate it manually in e.g. wordpress, Neos, Drupal, .....

See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Extending_the_developer_tools

All the best,
Sebastian

[oleq]

Hi, @skurfuerst!

Yes, we considered implementing native browser extension and, certainly, this approach has its advantages. But the list of drawbacks is, unfortunately, way longer:

• Current approach is really cross-browser. It works in Safari, iOS, Edge, and any other modern web browser. If we went with the native extension, we'd most likely be limited to Firefox and Chrome (and Chromium clones like Opera maybe?).
• Current approach allows you to run older versions of the inspector with older releases of CKEditor 5 easily. CKEditor 5 API changes every now and then and some developers must stick to older versions in their projects (plenty of reasons) and they need a working inspector too. They'd need to manually install earlier versions of the extension, which feels like a PITA especially if they use different CKEditor versions in different projects (context switching).
• ATM we showcase the inspector in our online documentation without people installing anything. It works out of the box and developers can play and learn more about the editor.
• What we have ATM is cheap to maintain. If we went with native extensions we'd need to react to browser extension API changes quickly so the extension does not get deprecated etc..

[skurfuerst]

Hey @oleq,

thanks for your detailed feedback! IMHO all your points totally make sense - I would have proposed to additionally take the current code and wrap it in a native extension.

However, I totally see that's quite some work, for questionable benefit. For Neos, I've just created a package which encapsulates the inspector; so people can easily use it for us :)

All the best, and keep up the great work,
Sebastian