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

331–340 of 360 posts

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

#331

Post by miniatureape »

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 can get a lot of this by using Chrome's Users feature. This allows you to switch between user accounts and have clean, extensionless sessions.

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

#332

Post by natehunzaker »

I love the work that you guys are doing on these tools, they've really come a long way in a short period of time. I find I prefer them to the Chrome tools for a number of reasons. However, I occasionally swap to Chrome for a couple of things:

- The timeline tab. I know there's a profiler panel in FF now, but I have trouble interpreting the results. This may have changed.

- Better stack traces

- The networking tab. Looks like this is in the pipeline. I can't wait to see what you come up with).

- In the style editor, as an Emacs user, I always accidentally ctrl+n to a new stylesheet instead of the next line. I'd really enjoy an easier way to edit keybindings.

- Live editing of JavaScript in the debugger would be really killer

- I often wish the debugger had the "pretty print" button Chrome offers to diminify scripts in the Sources tab.

On another note, Paul, I love the work you're doing on JSTerm. Keep up the great work.

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

#334

Post by EGreg »

csense wrote: post #310
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…

Why not just sign the file with GPG or openssl or something? If you need to deal with clients that aren't aware of the mechanism, you could just put the GPG signature in a custom HTTP header. If you need to use cloud hosting or the like, and you can't return custom headers, just put the signature in a file with the same name with .sig attached. In fact, I just downloaded a kernel tarball the other day, and kernel.org…

Because the browser should have no way of verifying that the file was really constant, and to do that it would need to ask other authorities who have downloaded the file in the past.

GPG only allows you to sign something, not guarantee it was always constant.

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

#335

Post by nathanstitt »

craigching wrote: post #295
nathanstitt wrote: post #163

Embed mozrepl https://github.com/bard/mozrepl/wiki or something simular. I'd like network based access (restricted to a socket or localhost by default) to the innards of the browser. Mozrepl works, but has proven fragile. I've had to make several updates to keep it working with the latest Firefox nightlies. I've currently got mozrepl hooked to emacs so when I save a js, coffeescript, or css/scss file it live updates…

>Embed mozrepl https://github.com/bard/mozrepl/wiki or something simular. I'd like network based access (restricted to a socket or localhost by default) to the innards of the browser. Mozrepl works, but has proven fragile. I've had to make several updates to keep it working with the latest Firefox nightlies. That looks really interesting. I just tried out swank-js and it worked for simple javascript, but it didn't wo…

I use it primarily with ExtJS and backbone. What I've done with mozrepl is inject some global javascript, then call methods off it over the network link, so for instance I have a reloadModel method that will remove the model's definition (basically delete window.Foo, but a bit more to it), then reload's the JS file which re-creates it. I've got this bound to occur automatically with emacs when coffeescript/js files save.

This method works for anything that can be removed from a system then reloaded. I'm not sure you could do that with jQuery, but you might be able to with a plugin I suppose. No idea on dojo, sorry.

My fixes for the nightlies is at: https://github.com/nathanstitt/mozrepl I haven't submitted a pull request until I'm sure things have settled down with the Firefox changes, but plan to do so soon.

Hit me up if you want further details.

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

#337

Post by stuaxo »

For so long I've been wanting a system I can ask -

Why is this element "HERE" - instead of "THERE" where "HERE" might be 60 pixels to the left, or off the screen + "THERE" is somewhere else.

Basically a system that would be able to interegate the DOM, work out which rules might be causing the problem or have a go at some modifications.

It could answer:

"blah.css resets clear on line 266" - toggle

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

#338

Post by math0ne »

olivierbeaulieu wrote: post #53

I work a lot on a Firefox extension, and honestly, the absence of dev tools for addons is really painful. Developping our extension for Chrome was super easy, since all their default devtools work in extension panels as well, but in Firefox it's been a nightmare, almost no tools. We are left off in a console.log madness trying to figure out what's causing bugs. It would be soooooo awesome to have Firefox's default de…

I'm prob missing something but isn't this what the DOM inspector is for?

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

#339

Post by math0ne »

I like some of the things you are doing with the new debug stuff. The ui however is way too large, when it comes to debugging in the browser I want density of information, less whitespace in between your controls, more information at once. Basically more like firebug is right now.
Post reply on HN