Firefox 3D view • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 3D view

#21

Post by brudgers » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 12:30 PM UTC

twelvechairs wrote: post #16

Nice feature but poor UI (controls) for me. Zoom (mousewheel) and rotate (left click) should take place around the cursor (or the 3d space it is currently hovering over) rather than the centre of the screen. Makes things much easier for the user (especially the power-user, who this is aimed at and can spare the 30-seconds to figure out how it works). As an extra, clicking the mousewheel down should allow you to 'pan'…

A click, rather than the mouse pointer, is useful for setting the center of rotation in 3d views...I prefer middle button (scroll wheel) click.

Re: Firefox 3D view

#22

Post by dangoor » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 12:32 PM UTC

Here's the blog post in which I introduced the feature...

http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/03/13/firefox-adds-new-dev...

The 3D view is not "every day" useful, but people have found it to be a quick way to spot unexpected nesting issues.

As noted elsewhere, this feature started life as an add-on made during Google Summer of Code 2011 by Victor Porof, who continues to work on Firefox developer tools today.

(in case you hadn't guessed, I work for Mozilla... usual biases therefore apply ;)

Re: Firefox 3D view

#23

Post by jastr » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 12:36 PM UTC

As someone who teaches intro to HTML classes, 3D view is a cool way to explain divs, spans, etc.

Re: Firefox 3D view

#24

Post by dbaupp » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 12:50 PM UTC

trinary wrote: post #8

It's been around as an addon for a while, I think it was put into FF at version 11 (March 2012). I really think it should have remained as an extension, it looks neat but is pretty useless.

It's not entirely useless: I think it at least could be used to provide beginners with some feeling/visualisation for how layout of a webpage works.

Re: Firefox 3D view

#25

Post by bretthopper » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 1:34 PM UTC

2010:

"Check out this site. Design is awesome."

"Yeah but did you view source? Terrible semantics and inline css."

2012:

"Check out this site. Design is awesome."

"Yeah but did use 3D View? The element stacking is terrible. Doesn't have those nice symmetrical pyramids you like to see."

Re: Firefox 3D view

#26

Post by Andrex » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 1:54 PM UTC

dangoor wrote: post #22

Here's the blog post in which I introduced the feature... http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/03/13/firefox-adds-new-dev... The 3D view is not "every day" useful, but people have found it to be a quick way to spot unexpected nesting issues. As noted elsewhere, this feature started life as an add-on made during Google Summer of Code 2011 by Victor Porof, who continues to work on Firefox developer tools today. (in case y…

It's apparently very useful for discovering some nasty XSS bugs. I think eventually, this might be one of the "last stops" in testing new front-end designs; a staple, but not something you need to be switching into every five minutes (unless there's something to be fixed.)

Very jealous of this as a Chrome user. :) Good job guys.

Re: Firefox 3D view

#27

Post by sergiotapia » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 2:14 PM UTC

AshleysBrain wrote: post #6

"Use cases ... it looks awesome ". Heh.

There's another thread on HN that shows it can be used to spot XSS vulnerabilities.

Re: Firefox 3D view

#28

Post by freditup » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 2:37 PM UTC

highace wrote: post #7

"This content covers features introduced in Firefox 11" We're now on Firefox 14. It's reasonably old.

It has been out for awhile, but it seems like a lot of people weren't aware of the feature. One additional usage - introduce non-programmers/web designers to what is really behind what they see on a webpage. Most people find the 3D view pretty cool, no matter if they're a technical person or not. It's also been great to see the FF developer tools improve so much recently.