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Yesterday Mozilla made headlines with a free service called Thimble, which is an open source alternative to services like Codepen, JSBin, or JSFiddle. The services aims to make testing and debugging easier for designers by giving them a sandbox to explore, break, fix, and just enjoy designing and developing.

Unfortunately, there seem to be issues upon rollout; 115 as of this post.

I have tried the service using Chrome and Firefox and have had a few problems that make this service hard to recommend (at this point). For some reason, when I create a folder and a file in that folder called style.css, Thimble has trouble saving it. Since there is not a manual save option and we have to rely on the auto-save feature, it is difficult to understand where the problem originates.

The preview pane of your code changes depending on what file you have highlighted. So if you are working on a javascript file, you'll need to click the html file to view the result of your changes.

I've worked with the same project in Chrome, Chrome Incognito, and Firefox and have only been able to "Publish" one time. Every other time, it just sits there telling me it is Publishing. Publish is a feature that give you a public URL to share with others to show your work.

To try out Thimble, I decided to test out the Last.FM Recently Played API. I'm not sure if this is why I get this error in Firefox and the Chrome badge in the address bar asking if I would like to load insecure scripts.

Thimble's blocked content in Chrome

Thimble's blocked content in Firefox

I tweeted the following yesterday.

David Humphrey, who looks to be one of the top contributors to the project was nice enough to respond and asked for feedback on any issues.

I am excited about Thimble and use these kind of services daily, but I'm not sure Thimble is ready to roll out. At this time, I can't seem to get a style.css file to save whether it be in custom folders or the root directory.

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