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The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

blog.mozilla.org

171–180 of 206 posts

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#171

This seems to reinforce the mindset that the web should be experienced and built using different tools for users vs. developers, and aside from thinking that's fundamentally condescending, I don't see why new tools couldn't simply be extended from FF's 'web developer' menu into a different mode of operation or even extensions. I think we're better off in a world where kids don't have to install ScaryFox on their tabl…

Fundamentally condescending? You can't possibly be serious, or else you have some horrifically misaligned emotional responses.

I see no problem in principle with Mozilla releasing a version of their browser with only very basic debugging tools. I don't think they should, but I wouldn't get indignant about it.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#172
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the point, but I think there is a reality where developing and actually experiencing the product can be fundamentally different. For instance the security model for a browser should be ultra tight and protect the user from the site, but as a developer I'd want to access and modify my files directly through the inspector panel. Another example would be the use of cache, where I want the minimum possible r…

>For instance the security model for a browser should be ultra tight and protect the user from the site, but as a developer I'd want to access and modify my files directly through the inspector panel. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=328026 >Another example would be the use of cache, where I want the minimum possible retention while a user would want the opposite. Chrome Inspector -> [x] Disable ca…

A fellow developer in my office uses Incognito mode, and it seems to work fine for him.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#173

I don't like google because of privacy concerns but chrome developer tools is a bit ahead of firefox DT. I hope this new one will give me a good reasons to switch from chrome to firefox

The recent developer tools improvements/additions to FireFox in the nightly (and maybe aurora) have, in my opinion, surpassed Chrome's.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#174

I don't like google because of privacy concerns but chrome developer tools is a bit ahead of firefox DT. I hope this new one will give me a good reasons to switch from chrome to firefox

The recent developer tools improvements/additions to FireFox in the nightly (and maybe aurora) have, in my opinion, surpassed Chrome's.

That's great news. Thanks

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#175
I remember people arguing in a thread a while ago about the financial longevity and user-base sustenance of FireFox. Many were arguing that FireFox needed something fresh and different and also needed to identify their target audience.

When Mozilla releases this, which is at least remotely intriguing, many are quick to find small deleterious criticisms.

The fact of the matter is that they are not removing the earlier dev-tools and nobody is forcing anybody to migrate to it. They are just trying to make another tool to help people. Honestly, if you put these arguments in any other context, either software or real life, they sound absolutely ridiculous.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#176
post #59
post #52

Sounds cool. Shame that Mozilla's developer tools are in some respects that are important to me still inferior to Chrome.

How so? I'm asking because two Firefox devtools people sit in my office, so if you have feedback, I can forward it.

It's starts with GUI issues where you can't resize certain things (e.g. columns in the network tab) or only in a very limited way (it got better). Not being able to inspect objects inline in the console is very annoying. Is there no "clear network log" button? No option to retain/not retain the network log on page loads? I want a way to view an element that got logged to the console in the DOM inspector (Chrome has: context menu -> show in DOM inspector). I want an auto-completion menu in the style editor in the DOM editor. And there seems to be no way to search in a script as shown in the debugger. That's such a basic function, it really makes me wonder. I want a reload menu like in Chrome, where with open inspector I can choose between "normal reload", "hard reload" and "clear cache and reload".

In Chrome's console I like that I simply can write the function name and press enter to see it's source. In Firefox I have to write "String(functionname)". That's only a minor thing. The best thing would be to get the function source expandable inline similar to what you can do with objects in Chrome's console. There should also be a link that lets you jump to the definition of the function in the JavaScript source.

There is no resource tab in Firefox. Basically I want exactly the resource tab from Chrome, with a list of all loaded images, scripts, styles etc., grouped by their origin. I want to see and be able to edit/remove all cookies, local storage, session storage etc.

You can't select a certain iframe as the context of the console, which makes it completely useless when you have to debug iframe based widgets.

I just had the case where the debugger statement starts the debugger but it did not focus on the source line where it occurs, because the debugger request the script again instead of showing the already loaded resource and the script was generated as a response to a POST request.

I don't use Firefox for debugging anymore (unless it's a Firefox specific bug I have to fix) so I don't quite remember the next bit: There where some kind of big annoyances concerning debugging and exceptions which are caught anyway. I could not get it to "halt on exception" but not on those that are caught.

That's all I can think of right now, but I'm sure I forgot something.

But granted, it is always getting better. Maybe some day it is as good as the Chrome Inspector. There is one point where it (or Firefox) is better: Error messages. They are much less cryptic and show the source line of the error. It says things along the lines of "in foo.bar foo has no method bar" instead of "undefined is not a function". Also a rethrown exception retains the original source line, which is very useful.

Firefox's font inspector is nice. I hadn't had a use for it yet, but I can imagine to have one some day.

In course of writing this comment I looked at the Firefox development tools again and a lot of things got indeed much better since the last time I looked.

OT: There are also a lot of things that annoy me about Chrome: Since many month now Linux integration got extremely worse. They dropped gtk for their own thing and screwed up big time in doing so. Context menus look totally alien and have no shadow, tooltips (title attribute) look alien and are no real windows (they get cropped, which makes them useless in certain contexts), there are lots of graphical glitches, e.g. when dragging stuff (white bg of the dragged image/text and for the drop marker arrow in the tab bar) and the scrollbars got the brain dead Windows behavior that not even IE uses anymore. IE implemented it's own scrollbars, apparently. Other scrollbars in Windows (and in Chrome) jump around and stop working when you drag the scrollbar and move the mouse an unknown invisible distance from the scrollbar. Oh and dragging tabs got unusable bad in Chrome. It's a complete disaster. The tabs aren't transparent but full sized when you drag them and you can't drag them down so the bottom border of the window gets outside of the screen, which makes it impossible to drag a tab to a different window that is located down in relation to the window you ripped the tab out of. And sometimes tabs move at an offset form where you grabbed them. WTF? There was a time where Chrome looked less of an alien under Linux than Firefox. Not anymore. Firefox didn't get any better, Chrome got much worse. At least you can use the mouse wheel on the tabs. That is something it does better than Firefox. And the tab size handling when closing tabs one after another. But enough of that.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#177
post #59
post #52

Sounds cool. Shame that Mozilla's developer tools are in some respects that are important to me still inferior to Chrome.

How so? I'm asking because two Firefox devtools people sit in my office, so if you have feedback, I can forward it.

PS: The monitorEvents helper function is a nice thing in Chrome. But that's not so hard to do inline using e.g.:

    foo.addEventListener("mousemove", function (event) { console.log(this,event); })
It's only a few characters more than:

    monitorEvents(foo,"mousemove")

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#178

This seems to reinforce the mindset that the web should be experienced and built using different tools for users vs. developers, and aside from thinking that's fundamentally condescending, I don't see why new tools couldn't simply be extended from FF's 'web developer' menu into a different mode of operation or even extensions. I think we're better off in a world where kids don't have to install ScaryFox on their tabl…

If you translate your entire comment to the non-browser development arena, it seems totally nuts. Should everyone have a full development toolchain on the 12" laptop they use to check email and read the news? I have four C compilers, three versions of Python, two Fortran compilers (and a partridge in a pear tree) on my laptop for my day-to-day development activities. Should we stuff all that in a browser? That's obvi…

> If you translate your entire comment to the non-browser development arena, it seems totally nuts.

Translate it to literacy then. Should everybody be a prolific author or an avid reader? No, it's okay if they're not. Should everybody have the option, the basic ability to? Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if it was considered a human right, or implied by human rights. It's not okay for people to be unable to read, just like poverty is not okay. And what's more, you don't need to know about the chemistry of ink or paper to be literate, just like you don't need to be able to solder a CPU from toothpicks to be computer literate. It's all a matter of degree, with no hard lines, but still, I'm not happy to give up that easily on that much.

We already accepted that making a website is too hard for "normal" users, that just everything taking place in the equivalent of malls is fine, with people hardly interacting in private or public spaces, except for a bunch of wizards in ivory towers, and that is a shame and cannot stand. Especially since the poison of planned obsolescence has already permeated anything to do with computing; if "normal" people can't create their own software and robots, it will not lead to better software and robots made by experts, it will lead to marketing departments shoveling regressing bloatware to people, ultimately. Yeah I'm exaggerating, too, this is FUD in a way, I know that... but I can't help it, this is the one thing to do with computers that really gets to me. I can live with not everybody being a programmer, but I cannot live with not every programmer wishing everybody could program. Being able to make a static website is not even a tiny subset of that, but if I can't even give up on general coding literacy, I can't even consider giving up on general web literacy.

So while it's totally silly to worry over the announcement of something when we don't even, and that will be freely available to everyone, I absolutely love that so many brought this issue up! It does give me hope. But so far, Mozilla has brought me nothing but joy, so I'm not anxious. Whatever it is, it will be open source, right? Right :D Anyone from Mozilla reading this, you guys rock.

TL;DR: I had a dream of a world where the words "developer" and "user" were out of use, just like "free citizen" as distinction to the default case of slave or woman is out of use today (well okay, those problems are also not overcome, but at least there is a consensus amongst smart people that they should be).

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#179
post #176
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? I'm asking because two Firefox devtools people sit in my office, so if you have feedback, I can forward it.

It's starts with GUI issues where you can't resize certain things (e.g. columns in the network tab) or only in a very limited way (it got better). Not being able to inspect objects inline in the console is very annoying. Is there no "clear network log" button? No option to retain/not retain the network log on page loads? I want a way to view an element that got logged to the console in the DOM inspector (Chrome has:…

But while all that features of Chrome are really nice, sometimes they stop working and you need to reload the inspector. The "show element in DOM inspector" context menu for elements logged in the console is what breaks most frequently.

Re: The First Browser Dedicated to Developers Is Coming

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For instance the security model for a browser should be ultra tight and protect the user from the site, but as a developer I'd want to access and modify my files directly through the inspector panel. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=328026 >Another example would be the use of cache, where I want the minimum possible retention while a user would want the opposite. Chrome Inspector -> [x] Disable ca…

A fellow developer in my office uses Incognito mode, and it seems to work fine for him.

That reminds me: It would be nice if you could open several different incognito windows, each with their own session. That way one can debug user interactions without needing as many browsers as users in the interaction (or half of it because each browser has it's own incognito session in addition to the normal session).
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