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Firefox Replay

firefox-replay.com

191–200 of 297 posts

Re: Firefox Replay

#191

Ooooh wow. This might be enough to get me to use Firefox to develop with. This could be huge for its market share, a big part of the reason chrome was able to become so popular was because of how good its devtools were (compared to the competition at the time). Firefox definitely managed to catch up but not before lots of devs switched to chrome and stopped checking for compatibility with Firefox.

There are still a lot of QoL features that Firefox DevTools misses. For example autocomplete for CSS classes, a tab for handling Service Workers, commands to perform actions (like disabling JavaScript), etc. I find myself switching between browsers just to take advantage of the different features each one provides which is slighly annoying. I would sincerely love some kind of unified DevTools.

Firefox sure has CSS auto-complete (at least in the inspector).

Re: Firefox Replay

#192
post #171

Maybe once they figure out how to monetize the data

Chrome's dev tools are so far beyond the competitions that this joke is a non-starter. When Chrome does add this capability(strange they haven't added it to date given the prior art from years ago), I can see it being used by actual devs inside Google and thus being actually useful. Contrast that with Firefox dev tools which seem to fall behind the priority list compared to new shiny flashy tech projects they concoct…

Don't know why you're downvoted but you're totally right. FF's dev tool is still very far behind Chrome's. IIRC things like websocket inspection aren't even in mainline FF yet.

If people want to see many examples of what Chrome's webtool can do and FF can't, just take a look at this page "What's New In DevTools" for each Chrome release.

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/10/devtools

Re: Firefox Replay

#193
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell once sold a “Developer Edition” laptop, so there is definitely a sizable market and developers do have some influence. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...

They still do: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-7390...

Damn, that's kind of a nice laptop. Pretty tempting actually, though I'd probably install Windows on it personally.

I was curious what specs made it "developer"-mode, and it looks like it's just a really big battery, very bright screen with good viewing angles, and easy to open with one hand (and a stable screen when you're moving around with it). Seems like it's specifically aimed at devs that work remote jobs and might be working outside from time to time?

Still, neat idea.

Re: Firefox Replay

#194
post #60

They should've put this note at the very top of the page: "Mac OS only for now!". What is the point of promoting this to everyone at this stage?

Team member here. Firefox Replay is currently in user research phase while we validate it.

Cross platform support will absolutely be a priority when Replay is on the official roadmap.

Thanks for the feedback, firefox-replay.com is also a work in progress. We did not plan an official release today.

We'll be sure to make the Mac OS limitation more clear.

Here is some more context on the mac specific functionality (https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/recordr...).

Re: Firefox Replay

#195
post #167
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about linux users?

Extremely featureful debuggers such as this one tend to require a great deal of code that is hardware-specific, in addition to being OS-specific. I assume MacOS was targeted first because it's the platform with the greatest degree of hardware uniformity. I fully expect Linux support to materialize someday, but with the caveat that I expect it will only (officially) work with the most popular hardware.

That's right. The only way to have a performant recording is to capture the browser's OS system calls in the recording. This unfortunately makes the feature quite OS specific.

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/recordr...

Replay is currently in the user-research validation phase. We care about cross platform support and will prioritize it when we are ready to commit to the feature.

Re: Firefox Replay

#196

If this works well, it could eventually be a very big boon for Firefox in the business world. Q&A can now send reproducible bug demos to development. Technical clients can do the same. I wouldn't be surprised if someone built tooling to map these recordings into automated tests either: expect the given recorded workflow to not throw errors. I can't quite remember when I had a bug where a tool like this would've been…

Thanks for the feedback!

Our #1 use-case at the moment is bug reports with a recording attached. We think that will really help when it comes to understanding the specifics of a bug when STRs are often not clear.

Re: Firefox Replay

#197
post #65
post #3

Why "Download Firefox Nightly for macOS"? Is it not supported on Linux and Windows? Why?

This blew me away a bit. Is MacOS this popular in the Web frontend crowd? I always felt that the price/quality ratio was way off with MacOS, compared to a good regular laptop. By good I mean top 10% ranked by price/quality. Even if it wasn't, Apple's general hostility towards consumers is infuriating. Right-to-repair is a banal example.

Firefox Replay supports MacOS while we're validating the feature. When it comes time to plan for releasing replay we'll work on cross-platform support.

Unfortunately, Replay hooks into low-level OS system calls to do the recording, which makes it non-trivial to support other platforms.

Re: Firefox Replay

#198
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some technical reason it's only for os x? I'm not really upset they targeted Macs first but I am a bit curious why they felt a need to.

Small user base to test?

Actually probably Mozilla’s largest user base

Re: Firefox Replay

#199
post #21

This didn't work for me. 1. I installed the nightly build as told. 2. Open nightly build 3. Went to the "Save Recording" option 4. The first two times, I got a [javascript error] saying I could not record. 5. The remaining couple of times - after I open a "New Recording Tab", whatever that is - I didn't see the javascript error but the website whose clickthru I wanted to record using this tool didn't even load in tha…

Hmm, join us in http://devtools-html.slack.com/ and we'd be happy to help you debug it.

If the tab crashed, you can get the report in about:crashes

Re: Firefox Replay

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome's dev tools are so far beyond the competitions that this joke is a non-starter. When Chrome does add this capability(strange they haven't added it to date given the prior art from years ago), I can see it being used by actual devs inside Google and thus being actually useful. Contrast that with Firefox dev tools which seem to fall behind the priority list compared to new shiny flashy tech projects they concoct…

Don't know why you're downvoted but you're totally right. FF's dev tool is still very far behind Chrome's. IIRC things like websocket inspection aren't even in mainline FF yet. If people want to see many examples of what Chrome's webtool can do and FF can't, just take a look at this page "What's New In DevTools" for each Chrome release. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/10/devtools

> things like websocket inspection aren't even in mainline FF yet

Releasing with Firefox 71. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/10/firefoxs-new-websocket-ins...

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