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Future of Firefox DevTools

paulrouget.com

151–160 of 170 posts

Re: Future of Firefox DevTools

#151
post #9

At the moment, I really like Chrome because I just find the behavior of the Omnibar superior to Firefox's Awesomebar. But hot damn, you're making me question loyalties on my dev machine.

Chrome's Omnibar constantly auto-completes searches I did earlier in the day and week, so that I often have to press delete before enter. And there is no settings toggle to turn this off.

(I'm not talking about the completion dropdown or what it contains, I'm talking about how the typed text in the input area has selected text appended to it when it happens to be a prefix for an earlier search.)

Between this, the lack of tree style tabs, and the weird text selection algorithm, I'm generally sticking with Firefox.

Re: Future of Firefox DevTools

#153
post #9

At the moment, I really like Chrome because I just find the behavior of the Omnibar superior to Firefox's Awesomebar. But hot damn, you're making me question loyalties on my dev machine.

Haha, I just switched from Chrome to Firefox because I hate how Chrome prioritizes Google Search over my previous history. It's idiotic. Here, let me show you a clear example. http://i.imgur.com/uNsh7Yv.png Firefox clearly has the superior bar.

I disagree. I think most people use the bar for searches, not their bookmarks.

Re: Future of Firefox DevTools

#154
post #110
post #37

How many devs actually use Firefox's dev tools? I see all of that praise "looks awesome, looks amazing, etc" But do people really use those amazing things? I just find the Chrome dev tools orders of magnitude more usable than Firefox's. It's mostly a large amount of what you could call details but it makes all the difference. It all flows better, reduces the amount of thinking you have to do as well as the number of…

why I am getting downvoted? because I'm not agreeing with the flock? I provided constructive feedback

Your feedback want constructive, it was vague and lacked any specific details mozilla could use to improve.

Re: Future of Firefox DevTools

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I removed search box from Firefox few months ago and never looked back. I use search engine keywords instead[1]. My current keywords include goog, bing, amzn, crate, and wiki. Guess what search engine they refer to. :) [1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

I really, really prefer the search box. For me, searching the web and searching my history are very different intents; so activating them with different keystrokes doesn't seem like much of a burden.

You'll love this https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-b...

Re: Future of Firefox DevTools

#156
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, I just switched from Chrome to Firefox because I hate how Chrome prioritizes Google Search over my previous history. It's idiotic. Here, let me show you a clear example. http://i.imgur.com/uNsh7Yv.png Firefox clearly has the superior bar.

I disagree. I think most people use the bar for searches, not their bookmarks.

Sure, but I don't really need the bar's help to type my search term. I do need its help to search my history/bookmarks.

Re: Future of Firefox DevTools

#157
post #102
post #35

I find the responses here really strange, has anyone here actually used the devtools in pratice? The firefox devtools seem to me just a awful waste of time from the beginning, they are years behind the competition and the development progress is so slow that I've given up on them. I'm using firefox as my main browser but for web development (dom/css inspection, javascript debugging) there is currently nothing that be…

Can you explain why nothing beats the chrome dev tools?

Sure, let me try by comparing it to the competition: the firefox devtools, firebug and opera inspector (I haven't used anything else). I'm using the chrome devtools for DOM inspection (HTML and SVG), CSS development and debugging, javascript repl and debugging (and via node-inspector also for server-side debugging) and HTTP profiling and protocol debugging. So I'm using it primarily for web development but its also an invaluable tool for web scraping where you can just copy&paste xpath expressions from the dom inspector for instance.

The Opera Developer Tools (Opera Dragonfly): The UX is done well, the markup editor works even better than in chrome and I like the screenshot utility and color picker. The css inspection is inconvenient when you want to change properties or add new rules. The network log is done well but the UX can become confusing, the make request feature is exceptional I don't know any other devtool that has that integrated. No xpath in the dom inspector.

Firebug: This was the first browser devtool afaik so it has a long history and years of development behind it, I always considered it to be "the firefox developer tools" and I was really surprised when mozilla announced they would recreate it on their own instead of just integrating firebug. But I guess they have their reasons.

Firebug has a great UX, everything is fast and polished although it has become a little old, it still integrates nicely in the current firefox UI. The dom and css inspector is great, it allows to quickly change anything you ever want, with the exception maybe that you cannot add new css rules (only element styles). The network inspector is exceptional, best of all 4. I don't like the console/REPL but its alright. Overall still my second favorite.

Chrome Developer Tools: Provides by far the best UX and is clearly the most powerful devtool around. Its also the only reason why I have chrome installed, my main browser is and was always firefox. The css inspector is just great, you can update or add new rules and properties and it has great auto completion. I don't like the dom editor through, the edit as html feature lacks a bit. Javascript debugging and the console work exceptionally well and you can even edit and save your code within the devtools. It has HTML5 builtin features for web workers, indexedDB, local storage, etc. You also can use it to debug nodejs applications through node-inspector.

Firefox Developer Tools: I must admit, I don't even know where to begin. The UX is just awful: From the alien dark-blue that doesn't integrate at all with the rest of firefox and the font sizes that you can't change to the strange dropdown menu/button combinations in the latest version. The DOM inspector doesn't allow you to edit html directly, has no xpath and the css inspector is confusing and doesn't has autocompletion. There is no resources overview, no networking debugging and profiling. I do however acknowledge there is some progress in the latest snapshots, I like the scratchpad, style editor and the UI overhaul made it a bit more usable. There are still no settings, still no way to change the dark theme. I don't say it isn't making some progress, but its so slow (they say they need a few months for the python api alone), that chrome will have progressed well beyond and I don't see them catching up.

Re: Future of Firefox DevTools

#158
post #108
post #15

The right-hand-side docking looks absolutely amazing ( http://i.imgur.com/duQOXq7.png ). I have another bit of feedback. The web console has three positions available: Above, Below, and Window. With Firebug, I like to have the console open in another monitor and give the browser viewport maximum screen real estate in front of me. Firefox's web console doesn't let me do this because in "Window" mode it doesn't quite a…

While right-side docking is great, especially for widescreen monitors, separate window for devtools would be much better improvement. In this case anyone can 'dock' them any way they like it. More important, you can have dev tools on one screen and page view on another.

Cannot agree enough with this.

Re: Future of Firefox DevTools

#159
Not that i hate these tools, but how much would this bloat up the browser? ( I am guessing they are less then a few MBs on installation size or download size? )

Re: Future of Firefox DevTools

#160
post #84
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Paul, What I understood from your article is that you're mostly exploring 1) the possibility of opening up the dev tools to locally-installed applications like SublimeText2; and 2) the integration of jsFiddle-like apps within DevTools. Please correct me if I misunderstood. What I'm asking about is creating an in-browser API for a website to interact with the dev tools. Obviously, this would require a very thorough…

Paul, very cool indeed. Stretch goal: How about having an in-browser API that could create such a websocket? That would open some interesting possibilities in terms of remote debugging by piping socket traffic over another socket/WebRTC datachannel as well as allowing websites to interact with the debugger.

Allowing websites to interact with the Debugger API is something we would like to do, but, as you note, the security implications require much more thought to get it right.
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