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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?

#211

Post by EGreg »

pfraze wrote: post #110
EGreg wrote: post #60

I'm glad you asked! This is a good time for me to bring up something I wrote two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024164 I really wish browser makers would do this! Mozilla can lead the way. I am going to post it here for ease of reference: 1) I propose a simple mechanism to guarantee that a resource located at a certain URL is always the same. Similar to how we have https:// blabla, and the user agent…

I really like your first proposal. The second one is good too, but less pressing to me than the first. The software I'm working on uses static JS with a high security requirement, and is meant to be deployed on any host. Integrity guarantees would be valuable for that.

I really hope Mozilla does it!

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

#212

Post by mbell »

callmevlad wrote: post #178
mbell wrote: post #73

This is a big request: Improve "design in the browser" capabilities. i.e. pushing CSS/HTML and maybe JS changes made in Dev Tools back to the source files without manual shenanigans in the middle. I probably waste more time copying CSS / HTML tweak diffs from the browser back into the related source files than anything else with in browser dev tools. Due to the nature of 'losing changes' if I happen to hit refresh or…

(Disclaimer: I'm working on http://www.webflow.com to try to solve this exact problem.) I've been thinking about this issue a lot over the last year, and it's really as hard as you state (and then some). We ended up having to create our own supersets of the DOM/CSSOM in order to keep track of individual elements/selectors as they are created/removed/changed. I would be very surprised (and pleased) if Mozilla was able…

My thought is that this is really most useful for CSS and the transformations that SASS/LESS are capable of are relatively mundane in comparison to CS -> JS. In addition I only see this as a tool for development, not something that I would want running in production so you don't have the concerns over increased file size or still supporting minification that you do with source maps, assuming you want source maps in production for error reporting.

I can envision simply using structured CSS comments to pass the needed information to the browser. The browser only needs a structured pushing protocol, baseline comment format, probably handling of comments that indicate file boundaries (used for pushing to the correct resource) and a 'plugin api' to allow plugins to parse other comments in a meaningful way, SASS/LESS could provide a 'Dev tools' plugin to parse the comments and support whatever editing features they wanted. They would also have to support generation of the comments in the preprocessor.

The important bit is a standardized pushing protocol, a standardized way to provide additional mapping information and a standardized 'plugin' style system to allow things like SASS to add to dev tools additional editing support.

Just one theoretical approach, still a ton of work, but I really think there is a lot of developer time spent dealing with this issue so it may well be worth it.

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

#214

Post by campd »

paulrouget wrote: post #88
sisk wrote: post #51

Hey Paul. First off, thanks for reaching out to the community like this. A few things: Visualized event bindings. Would be awesome to have a visual indicator of event bindings right on the page. Color-coded bounding boxes drawn around elements with a label denoting the event type. Clicking on that box (or label in the case of an element with multiple bindings or nested elements with bindings) would direct you to the…

> Visualized event bindings Yeah, we've been thinking a lot about that lately. Not a priority though (yet?). > An aggregate repaint view I filed a platform bug just about that today :) I think it can be done soon. > An intelligent debugger that would automatically step over certain files That's interesting. I never thought about this. I like that.

> > An intelligent debugger that would automatically step over certain files

> That's interesting. I never thought about this. I like that.

You haven't been reading your mail, paul!

We discussed this briefly in https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.developer-tool... and are planning to work it in to our schedule.

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

#215

Post by kalail »

Small but irritating issue: The clicking and editing mechanics of Firefox's CSS 'Rules' sidebar is just-a-bit too sticky. It'd be nice to be able to use the arrow keys to move around different fields instead of just TAB and SHIFT + TAB.

The left - right keys should obviously only jump fields once the cursor is at the edge of the current field. Kinda like Microsoft Excel cells, if you know what I mean.

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

#216

Post by kalail »

Small but irritating issue: The clicking and editing mechanics of Firefox's CSS 'Rules' sidebar is just-a-bit too sticky. It'd be nice to be able to use the arrow keys to move around different fields instead of just TAB and SHIFT + TAB.

The left - right keys should obviously only jump fields once the cursor is at the edge of the current field. Kinda like Microsoft Excel cells, if you know what I mean.

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

#217

Post by bzbarsky »

Benferhat wrote: post #45

It would be great if it was easier to debug errors like this: [12:11:02.525] Empty string passed to getElementById(). @ https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js:3 Especially when Firefox throws the error and Chromium doesn't.

For what it's worth, it's a warning, not an error. And Chrome doesn't have this warning at all, hence it not showing up there.

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

#218

Post by digitalzombie »

edit:

Sorry I didn't read the link you included.

You've made what I've just requested. Thank you so much!

---------

I know you guys have a lot of built in tools for web development.

But they're (the web dev tools) are all separated. It's nice and I like it. But is there a single shortcut or something where I can click and have it all organize in one giant tool? Like Firebug?

Btw, I loooove mozilla (borderline fanboy) and aurora is awesome, thank you for an awesome product.

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

#219

Post by digitalzombie »

benaston wrote: post #127

Copy Chrome?

Hell no. They over optimize and it's horrible developing in it because those bugs are so rare and so hard it's annoying.

We had a feature to upload pictures and the img file have to have a certain format. If we upload the img to replace the current one, chrome cache the old image. It's annoying as hell.

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