Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#31

Post by jjoonathan » Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

digitarald wrote: post #14

jchw wrote: post #4

Oh my God, this has been such a long time coming. Debugging WebSocket connections has been one of the main reasons I’ve had to open up Chrome in recent memory. There might not be full feature parity but I think now Firefox’s dev tools are at least complete for my uses.

I'd love to hear what other things come to mind regarding feature parity. We have been hitting a few of those out of the park lately and are slowly running out of obvious ones crossing fingers

I seem to be running across an increasing number of buttons that simply don't register clicks in Firefox. It's probably not FF's fault -- my money would be on webdevs leaning on chrome-only features -- but it does bring my Firefox session to a screeching halt and sends me back to chrome, usually after filling a form and trying to hit submit. It happens about once a week.

That's probably way too vague to be helpful unless someone else knows what I'm talking about, but if nobody does, I suppose knowing that could help motivate me to isolate and reproduce the issue next time it happens.

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#32

Post by seba_dos1 » Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #15

pimterry wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that might bog down or even crash devtools I'm not convinced - if that's true, then there's so many frames that clicking the websocket would crash devtools, which is equally unacceptable. In my experience people tend to use websockets in a not that dissimilar way to how they'd previously use pure HTTP requests, but now the server can instantly push data back too. If that is typical (hard to say) then it shouldn't b…

> I'm not convinced - if that's true, then there's so many frames that clicking the websocket would crash devtools, which is equally unacceptable. I routinely see devtools of both Chrome and Firefox bog down if you preserve transactions or stay ona page with a log or background requests for a while or the console and load a few pages with a lot of ajax and/or js or that log a lot. I'm not making some assumption about…

> I routinely see devtools of both Chrome and Firefox bog down if you preserve transactions or stay ona page with a log or background requests for a while or the console and load a few pages with a lot of ajax and/or js or that log a lot.

Fun thing is - there is no real reason for that to happen. It's just that both devtools are written using HTML and JavaScript, and it's not trivial to handle big sets of data there.

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#33

Post by gambler » Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

digitarald wrote: post #14

jchw wrote: post #4

Oh my God, this has been such a long time coming. Debugging WebSocket connections has been one of the main reasons I’ve had to open up Chrome in recent memory. There might not be full feature parity but I think now Firefox’s dev tools are at least complete for my uses.

I'd love to hear what other things come to mind regarding feature parity. We have been hitting a few of those out of the park lately and are slowly running out of obvious ones crossing fingers

Chrome is usable as a standalone mini-IDE. You can open developer tools, go to sources, open a folder as a workspace and start making an actual webpage - from scratch. It can create, open, save and edit files.

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#34

Post by cmroanirgo » Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #31

digitarald wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear what other things come to mind regarding feature parity. We have been hitting a few of those out of the park lately and are slowly running out of obvious ones crossing fingers

I seem to be running across an increasing number of buttons that simply don't register clicks in Firefox. It's probably not FF's fault -- my money would be on webdevs leaning on chrome-only features -- but it does bring my Firefox session to a screeching halt and sends me back to chrome, usually after filling a form and trying to hit submit. It happens about once a week. That's probably way too vague to be helpful un…

A lot of the time that it happens to me, and I've bothered to check, it's always been some react code that's had errors.

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#35

Post by ArtWomb » Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 11:16 PM UTC

>>> Binary payload viewer

Now you have my attention. I deploy both JSON and base64 string messages. It would save a lot of code-time effort to have a MITM custom handler that would allow me to inspect parse manipulate and view side effects

Thnx for building ;)

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#36

Post by cfreeman » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 12:26 AM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #31

digitarald wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear what other things come to mind regarding feature parity. We have been hitting a few of those out of the park lately and are slowly running out of obvious ones crossing fingers

I seem to be running across an increasing number of buttons that simply don't register clicks in Firefox. It's probably not FF's fault -- my money would be on webdevs leaning on chrome-only features -- but it does bring my Firefox session to a screeching halt and sends me back to chrome, usually after filling a form and trying to hit submit. It happens about once a week. That's probably way too vague to be helpful un…

It could be the different extensions you have installed. Often this happens with adblockers, so if you use incognito mode or another browser it would fix it.

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#37

Post by MuffinFlavored » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 12:43 AM UTC

wyuenho wrote: post #7

Nice! When can I debug nodejs code in Firefox?

I wonder if the deno project will integrate against this.

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#38

Post by xenostar » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 1:13 AM UTC

digitarald wrote: post #14

jchw wrote: post #4

Oh my God, this has been such a long time coming. Debugging WebSocket connections has been one of the main reasons I’ve had to open up Chrome in recent memory. There might not be full feature parity but I think now Firefox’s dev tools are at least complete for my uses.

I'd love to hear what other things come to mind regarding feature parity. We have been hitting a few of those out of the park lately and are slowly running out of obvious ones crossing fingers

When I change a CSS property in the Rules tab under the Inspector, and I press ctrl/cmd+z, it doesn't set the property back to what it was before I changed it. And obviously ctrl/cmd+y doesn't go forwards.

It's amazing how such a small change makes it so much more difficult to use the Firefox dev tools compared to Chrome. Sometimes I just want to toggle between CSS values and see what is changing, or undo a few changes I made.

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#39

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 1:57 AM UTC

cft wrote: post #23

Binary WS data inspector with an ASCII decoder would be useful: the current trend is to use binary WS socket data to obfuscate/prevent scraping (e.g. NYSE.com real time quotes)

Plugable, Wireshark-style data dissectors would be the best option.

Re: Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

#40

Post by bastawhiz » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 2:02 AM UTC

Finally! This has been on my list of "reasons why I can't use Firefox to do my job" for nearly a DECADE. Glad to see it's finally here, but wish it had been done long ago. Better late than never.