Bespin is a Web Based Editor from Mozilla Labs

a more active thread on the same topic is here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479410" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479410</a>

Off topic for Bespin, but on topic for their site, I just had one of those "if you want your customers to use it make it easy to play with" moments. I actually caught myself weighing the benefits of seeing it first hand vs putting my email address into another database. Then when I clicked register to fact check this comment it gave me (well, Chrome) the inferior-browser-F-U:<p><i>We would love to have you try Bespin<p>Unfortunately, we are using exciting new technology in HTML 5 that only leading browsers have implemented.<p>We want to push the Open Web forward, so for this tech preview you will have to use a new browser.<p>We have successfully tested Bespin on Firefox 3 and WebKit Nightly, so try one of them!</i><p>Oh well. :/

I've been using a javascript based editor for this:<p><a href="http://www.heclbuilder.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.heclbuilder.com</a><p>It seems to work ok, although it's not as full featured as their system.<p>As for me, though... they will pry Emacs out of my cold, dead hands.

I hope they've succeeded in creating a viable web-based editor, which I (and I'm sure many others here at HN) have thought about before. But it's possible they just have their heads in the clouds...

I've always thought of code editors as a bulletproof example of apps that has to be written in native code.<p>Very interested to see the code and how they did all this in Canvas in a sensible way.

Are canvas drawn apps going to be the launching point for Web 3.0?<p>I'm really amazed at the performance. This is Javascript, drawing characters pixel-by-pixel? Whoa.