Live data from Hacker News

Designing Tools

blog.mozilla.org

21–30 of 53 posts

Re: Designing Tools

#21
I'm trying to move from firebug to the native firefox development tools. The one thing I miss is the network tab doesn't render formatted html or datastuctures, it just text dumps (firebug give you the option and shows json, html, formatted). That and it seems the network tool turns on when you click the tab, but no way to turn off.

Other than that I really like the tools.

Re: Designing Tools

#22

A little off-topic, but I was just reading this: > In response to this, Mozilla has designed a way to lock the device and offer guest access to apps predefined by the user with a green light to allow anyone to use them. All other apps will remain behind a password protected wall until the primary user changes the settings. http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240215078/Mozilla-launch... This is actually an idea I also…

Well, it's not quite a chat app... but Firefox Sync does do client-side encryption. Conceivably you could sync browsers with someone afar, and then communicate securely by adding bookmarks containing messages and waiting for the browser to sync them. :P

Re: Designing Tools

#23
post #20

What I miss in FF developer tools and makes me use Chrome Dev Tools instead: - Working on the console is a nice REPL experience with code completion and data structure navigation, almost similar to a Smalltalk/Lisp workspace - I can work on the console whenever I feel like it and do not have to pause the debugger - More freedom to place breakpoints in the whole browser stack (events, html changes, ajax calls, ...) -…

They've added a number of those things, they just are just coming down the pipeline. Check out Aurora for some of these things, such as more breakpoint options and reformatting JS.

Re: Designing Tools

#24

I'm trying to move from firebug to the native firefox development tools. The one thing I miss is the network tab doesn't render formatted html or datastuctures, it just text dumps (firebug give you the option and shows json, html, formatted). That and it seems the network tool turns on when you click the tab, but no way to turn off. Other than that I really like the tools.

You should grab our Nightly build then :) We have parsed responses in the Network tab, I just tried HTML and JSON for you and both show as expected. See http://imgur.com/OHO4lFH and get Nightly at http://nightly.mozilla.org/.

Re: Designing Tools

#25
post #4
post #2

Two questions: To those who are color blind, how do you overcome color blind in software? Do you guys have software to help changing color on your computer? Should and will Firefox address that kind of problem? Nightly defaults to the dark theme. I like old white theme. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=947242 why do we choose the dark theme over the white theme? I am not color blind but I use computer typ…

Yes, the current dark theme does not have high enough contrast. There is a bug opened to switch to higher contrast colors in the dark theme here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=971418 (and this will likely be uplifted to Aurora after landing).

There is a light theme in Aurora right now.

Re: Designing Tools

#26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox also provides a suggestions list for CSS properties and values in the rule view and the markup view of Inspector since Firefox 25.

Actually I don't think it does for values. I just tried to 'change' the value of a font CSS property on Hacker News from Vedrana to something else and it didn't offer any font names.

What do you expect? Should it show every possible font you can type into the property? Just the fonts installed on your machine that other people may not have?

Just any property that has a preset number of values show up as options as you type. The difference is that Chrome shows a dropdown list while with Firefox you have to sort of remember the values as it does an autocomplete. I see no reason Firefox couldn't offer the dropdown since it clearly knows the possible values.

By the way, I tried the same font thing in Chrome and it responded the same way, no font list. You can see a similar behavior with color, for the value it shows possible colors by name. Start your color with # and suddenly there's no options. If there are too many possibilities to list it doesn't list anything.

Re: Designing Tools

#27
post #3

Mozilla keeps changing the dev tools while the WebKit inspector remains fairly consistent. I no idea how to quantify it, but I just prefer the inspector, by a long shot. The networking tab and DOM inspector are brilliant.

If by WebKit, you mean Chrome, sure. Safari's inspector is a mess.

Re: Designing Tools

#28
I like FF dev tools a lot, yet there is some stuff there that could be better:

- no call stack(?)

- breakpoints are a bit of a hit or miss, especially when callbacks are involved.

- http request monitoring is a bit messy - you see the request in the console, you can click on them, but the resulting dialog box only offers basic info, without even an option to go to the clicked url directly. In network panel the functionality is completely different for some reason. Fortunately mostly fine, but one irritating thing is that response view is so little and you cannot make it much wider.

But anyway, they're improving greatly, only a couple of months back you couldn't even think about not using Firebug in FF. So kudos to them for all the hard work.

Re: Designing Tools

#29

I recently tried switching to Firefox at the place I'm currently freelancing at. Not too much front-end stuff going on, just a bit of CSS here and a bit of JS there. The two little things that annoyed me most: When inspecting an element, the element is per default collapsed (i.e. it's children are not shown). Often, I want to see the children as well - one more unnecessary click. This may be a good design decision if…

I just tried inspecting an element in Chrome and it didn't automatically expand to show the children. That's the behavior I would have expected. Interesting that it behaves differently for you. Are you sure you're not inspecting the child, thinking you are inspecting the parent, which would appear to be expanded in that case?

Firefox offers a dark theme in the inspector's settings, maybe try that. I personally don't like it though.

Re: Designing Tools

#30

I'm trying to move from firebug to the native firefox development tools. The one thing I miss is the network tab doesn't render formatted html or datastuctures, it just text dumps (firebug give you the option and shows json, html, formatted). That and it seems the network tool turns on when you click the tab, but no way to turn off. Other than that I really like the tools.

I second that. Also, in Firebug, you can see the padding clearly (it's in a different color) when you hover over an element with the inspector. This is not the case in the Firefox Development Tools. It's still possible to get the same information from the Box Model view but it's just nice to be able to see it visually on the page.
Post reply on HN