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Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

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Re: Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

#11

Honestly, the absolute best thing you could do for any dev, is lighten the footprint FF currently has on my ram, and continue to improve the api for add-ons/plugins. The more stable, extensible and fast FireFox is, the more useful I will find it for development. But if more kludge is added to it, and it continues to get slower/bigger, the less likely I am to continue to use it, regardless of what amazing plugins are…

We already have a team working on memory consumption (and we already made some gigantic progress). We also have a team working on improving addons APIs (see the new builin SDK).

We are also looking at existing extensions.

Re: Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

#13
The guy is asking for suggestion to the DEVELOPER TOOLS... no to the firefox browser itself.

I have to admit that i changed my dev browser to chrome. The chrome developer tools are great. I like to have everything on one panel instead of the console in one place and the html and css in another.

Re: Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

#14
post #9

The JavaScript object browser mini-windows do not behave properly on Awesome, a tiling window manager. There is no way to close the windows without closing the entire web console. If I try to close the window like I close any other window, it will close the full browser window.

We are already working on that (we call the "variable view"). It won't be a window anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

#17
post #7

How about exposing an API for dev tools similar to the "swank" protocol that Emacs uses for editing Lisp code? I know there are people doing stuff like this already, but it would obviously be a lot easier if there were a nice protocol for it (ideally standardized across browsers...). I want to be able to seamlessly interact with a running Firefox instance from my editor or IDE, sending it snippets of code to evaluate…

Just FYI: You can do exactly this with the latest Light Table[1]. :)

[1]: http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/02/27/light-table-030-expe...

Re: Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

#18
post #7

How about exposing an API for dev tools similar to the "swank" protocol that Emacs uses for editing Lisp code? I know there are people doing stuff like this already, but it would obviously be a lot easier if there were a nice protocol for it (ideally standardized across browsers...). I want to be able to seamlessly interact with a running Firefox instance from my editor or IDE, sending it snippets of code to evaluate…

That's interesting. I'll look at that. Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

#19

Honestly, the absolute best thing you could do for any dev, is lighten the footprint FF currently has on my ram, and continue to improve the api for add-ons/plugins. The more stable, extensible and fast FireFox is, the more useful I will find it for development. But if more kludge is added to it, and it continues to get slower/bigger, the less likely I am to continue to use it, regardless of what amazing plugins are…

This and tabs on the left. It feels like using Tree Style Tab is not really fully optimized.

I don't think you need to add a more things for developers. The tools already present are good enough, I saw someone suggesting a built-in sFTP. That's just too much.

Re: Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

#20
The main reason I'm still using Firefox as my main browser is Firebug, which is still better than the competition. Unfortunately it's a memory hog and dramatically slows down the whole browser. So my vote goes to performance improvements for Firebug.
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