Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 360 posts

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

#261

Post by electrotype »

I'm a big Firefox fan for one major reason : it's the most customizable browser out there. I just love the right-click/Customize and all the available extensions.

My suggestion won't be for a new tool, but it's a suggestion anyway : Please always allow users the decide what they prefere. Choose any defaults you think are the best, but always add a configuration to be able to change it!

An example of this : I don't remember when exactly, but in one release, Firefox devs decided to remove the "loading cursor"( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482985 ) without any config:about setting to enable it back!!! I was furious, not simply because I prefere to see this loading cursor, but because Firefox didn't allow me the choose what I wanted.

Thanks for reading and thanks a lot to all devs contributing to this wonderful browser!

-----

(By the way, it's now possible to enable the loading cursor using ui.use_activity_cursor = true)

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

#262

Post by frewsxcv »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #3

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…

Firefox uses much less memory than Chromium does on my Linux machine. How much memory is Firefox using compared to Chrom(e/ium) for you?

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

#263

Post by lobster_johnson »

bliker wrote: post #242
lobster_johnson wrote: post #228

I believe all the current development tools do it wrong, and the right place for a tool is outside the browser, as a custom shell around the main browser component. This is how I tend to work: I load up an app. I set up my credentials (by logging in or setting a particular cookie manually, for example). I debug using Firebug, mainly using the DOM view, the console and the JavaScript REPL. Then I might change my crede…

You should, I like that idea very much. I was also having a similar problem with mixing work & personal data. Now I am using Canary as development browser, that itself is enormous resource hog. If you will continue working on such a project I am happy to help!

I'm going to see about resurrecting the project and putting it up on Github soon!

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

#264

Post by ephemient »

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.

My workaround is to click an element, then type into console

    $0.appendChild(document.createElement('tagName'))
but yeah, a [+] button would be nice…

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

#265

Post by JohnBooty »

bmuon wrote: post #258
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...

First off, thanks for the link! I up-voted you; that's a really good introduction to source maps.

I believe it would be incredibly useful if FF's dev tools could do some of this on their own; primarily for the reason that the person debugging the Javascript can't always control the build process. The times when you don't have access to the build process and/or the original unminified code are the times when you need this functionality the most.

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

#266

Post by shuzchen »

campd wrote: post #226
OmarIsmail wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why we still work on Firebug To be quite frank, this is really ridiculous to me. Why in heck are there TWO separate developer tools for one browser that are both in-house? Supporting both tools means that neither one moves as quickly, and there's a ridiculous amount of confusion as to which one to use. Imagine the noobie developer that has cut their teeth on the elegant Chrome dev tools. Now they need to do…

> To be quite frank, this is really ridiculous to me. Why in heck are there TWO separate developer tools for one browser that are both in-house? I tried to clarify this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5326873 - let me know if I can clarify further.

That still doesn't why there are two separate developer tools. Is there something that an in-house tool tied into firefox is capable of that is impossible for a plugin to achieve?

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

#268

Post by aquanext »

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…

Yeah, I think it would really set Firefox above everyone else is if it had its own web IDE (live WYSIWYG and code editing) built right in. It'd have to be a good one and you shouldn't try to force people to use it who don't want to. But I agree with other folks here: We all would kind of like the option to use something like that right in the browser.

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

#269

Post by saraid216 »

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?

My favorite thing about Chrome is that I can open up "View background processes", get a list of which tabs are using up how much memory, and then click-and-kill selectively.

But this is an end user experience, rather than a web dev experience.

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

#270

Post by collypops »

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…

I wrote a post about a year ago, to open up a discussion about what browser vendors can do to encourage rapid prototyping designing in the browser, by giving them tools for visual design that they would opt to use over software like Photoshop/Fireworks.

I'd love to see more tools that enable rapid prototyping, including the ability to craft CSS in a more visual manner.

Here's the post, for any who are interested:

http://blog.colin-gourlay.com/blog/2012/03/how-can-browser-b...

Post reply on HN