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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?

#251

Post by nfm »

Firefox is my primary browser, but I use Chrome to do development, entirely because of the dev tools. I'd really like to move my development back to Firefox.

For me, I'm held back more by the UI rather than the features. I find the different, independent panels very confusing, and the popups (for eg. XHR request info) drive me nuts. I'm sure there's a strong rationale for how it is, but it doesn't quite click for me.

I've tried going back to Firebug where the UI is more my style, but for me, it's too slow (on my not new, but not old laptop). It often takes several seconds to launch the select element tool, and can lock up for a couple of seconds at a time.

The built-in tools are much faster, which is great. I'm just not accustomed to the UI, and have reservations about whether I can get into it or not.

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

#252

Post by modarts »

mbell wrote: post #123
nailer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. I can't even add an element directly in the Chrome dev tools - you can only edit an existing elements HTML and append something after it. My kingdom for a '+' button.

You can, sort of. Right click on an element and choose "edit as HTML" and you can add whatever you want, granted it offers no reasonable formatting, its just a wall of text, not even tabs / line breaks. It is also broken in that when you do this Chrome rebuilds all the sub elements of what your editing so if there were event hooks or anything like that on the elements they will be gone.

Not to mention dragging over text to select it usually results in the entire HTML fragment getting destroyed when Chrome decides that you're actually attempting to drag the text to move it somewhere else.

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

#253

Post by nawitus »

kevincrane wrote: post #249
nawitus wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I'd say 30 processes is a lot better than 1 process. You also need to take into consideration that the number of cores is increasing pretty quickly. Pretty soon consumers will have 32 cores and whatnot. I'm a Firefox user but really it's the largest weakness Firefox is having. If I open two new tabs simultaneously, the whole browser can freeze for a bit.

Honestly (and I'm fairly certain this is a bad reason), it's a cleanliness thing. If I use top or the process manager, it gets annoying to scroll through countless variations of 'chrome'. Maybe if the process manager could group those into one heading where I just see "Chrome (30 processes)", I'd feel better about it?

That's what my "process manager" called pstree on Linux does:

├─firefox───36*[{firefox}]

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

#255

Post by Benferhat »

bzbarsky wrote: post #217
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.

Sadly, it's the only clue I have as to why my form's submit button isn't working.

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

#256

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sambeau wrote: post #139
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…

Just being able to hold down a modifier key to move an element up down left and right would be great. You can do this in one dimension at a time at present but to be able to exactly place something would be a tremendous time saver.

>You can do this in one dimension at a time at present //

In FF dev tools?

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

#257

Post by mehrzad »

tholex wrote: post #183
mehrzad wrote: post #76

Personally I find it annoying that is displayed as . I never understood why this is.

This creates separate click areas for "change the name of this tag" vs "add an attribute". I find myself adding classes and attributes often, so I'm a proponent of . Chrome's tools only show , and the only way to add a class requires two clicks on "tag", and then a click on ">", which is really wonky.

I thought this might be why. Fair enough, not a bad feature.

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

#258

Post by bmuon »

JohnBooty wrote: post #102

It would be nice if there was a way (or ways) to ease the pain of debugging minimized CSS/JS files. We've all been there, right? Uncaught exception on Line 2, Column 49,392 of /foo/jquery.min.js, right? 1. For well-known source files (like major jQuery releases, etc) perhaps the debugger could (optionally) switch to the unminimized version. This could be done via file hash comparisons based on a table stored on Mozil…

This is what sourcemaps are for. You can minify your JS files with the Closure Compiler and tell it to create a Source Map. Then tell the developer tools to use that sourcemap and you'll debug looking at the unminified code even if you're running the minified one.

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...

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

#259

Post by soapdog »

I would like a record/replay feature for AJAX requests or at least an interface where I could easily assemble a request as if it was sent from the current app.

A possible "exporter" for the changes you made on the current web page would help some people I know, specially with CSS stuff.

Some integration with MDN documentation would also be a boon, like right-clicking a function and seeing the docs. Like Lisp HyperSpec gizmo.

I don't think that the inclusion of dev tools is cluttering or bloating. We should always include them even if the final user never uses it. The potential for a free tweekable web is there. Lots of people start learning more about webmaking by trying stuff on web consoles.

PS: On saturday I will be a speaker on the largest Javascript event in Rio de Janeiro (http://riojs.org). I will be speaking about Firefox OS (I am a mozillian volunteer) and I will be showing all my stuff using the current devtools from the responsive design view to the web console, so BIG THANKS to @paulrouget and the team for making my life easier!

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

#260

Post by bmuon »

modeless wrote: post #224

My biggest annoyances with the dev tools right now are: 1. The debugger has no REPL. If you evaluate a statement in the console, it doesn't run in the current stack frame and has no access to locals, etc. The only way to execute a statement in the current stack frame is to add it as a "watch" and then delete it. 2. There's no way to get to the console from the debugger and vice versa. You have to activate them indepe…

1. Yes, this. 2. Try the Aurora channel. Now the developer tools look pretty much like Firebug 3. Yes!
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