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Firefox Replay

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81–90 of 297 posts

Re: Firefox Replay

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers in general are very influential. Not only among our family and friends, but also because our choices create a lock-in effect due to the nature of our work. When you use Chrome day in and out, your work is going to be optimized for Chrome and will work best on Chrome. This led to a Chrome-optimized web and while Google isn't necessarily to blame, we're back to the days of " works best in IExplorer 6 ". Comp…

Developers and computer geeks have been overestimating their influence for over a decade. If geeks were influential, the “year of the Linux desktop” would have been years ago, no one would be on Facebook, and people wouldn’t buy into Apple’s wall garden and people would care about “freedom”. Definitely no one would have bought the iPod since it “had less space than the Nomad and no wireless”. ( https://slashdot.org/s…

> Developers and computer geeks have been overestimating their influence for over a decade. I

It's a lot easier to get people to switch browsers than OSs.

Re: Firefox Replay

#82
post #68
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selection bias. People who go to tech conferences make up a tiny share of all the people working in the industry. Plus they're far more likely to look towards other people going to those conferences for "trends" than to the majority who don't, thus reinforcing that bias. Even most designers I know personally don't use macOS. But if I was going by what I see at JS conferences, you'd think Apple has a 99% marketshare (…

> Selection bias. People who go to tech conferences make up a tiny share of all the people working in the industry. Yes, but they're also more influential in the respective communities, and more probable as presenters to be writing stuff others use (e.g. this Firefox dev tool). So they'll use what they personally use to develop. > Also FWIW as a long time JS dev, it seemed to me like Rails actually was one of the maj…

Interesting. It definitely didn't seem the case for web dev outside of Rails though. In the mid-2000s it felt to me like the default was Linux (because servers were running Linux) and beginners started on Windows (because that's what they already had at home). But then again web dev mostly meant LAMP (or WAMP for development, via XAMPP).

But this may be a regional thing (so selection bias again). When I was freelancing as a Python web dev, the few places that used Python usually used Plone/Zope (barely anyone used Django or Flask) and there were even fewer places using Ruby except startups. The popularity of Plone/Zope seems to be very much a German thing, just like SuSE Linux and Typo3/Drupal (instead of Wordpress). We've even had a very large Firefox marketshare until fairly recently (because of privacy concerns over Google Chrome).

That said, in European JS conferences over the past five years I'm definitely seeing more and more non-macbooks each year.

Re: Firefox Replay

#83
post #77
post #72

I am not primarily a web developer, but I guess I don't really see it. I suppose 'rewind' would mostly be useful for Javascript applications? But in Javascript you can already debug pretty well. It's been a while, but I suppose Javascript debuggers can drop frames, like debugging other languages, so you already have a kind of rewind? Does anyone have a good example use case for this?

I'm not quite sure what "drop frames" means in this context, but a use case would be stepping through the debugger, realising that the problem might be in a piece of code that has already executed, and wanting to inspect the value of a variable at that point in time. Or even more mundane: accidentally hitting "Step over" twice in a row.

In most debuggers you can drop back up the stack to the code that called the function you are currently in, and thus debug through the function call again.

Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2367816/when-using-the-j...

"Using the "Drop Frame" functionality you can "fall back" to a previous stack frame, in a sense going back in time."

Re: Firefox Replay

#84
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.

Last seven years, all the companies I worked at had the majority/all devs using Macs. That's not only frontend, but backend (Java/Scala/PHP) and Android devs. And this was not in the US.

Re: Firefox Replay

#85
post #62
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to a Rails conference. Or a Node conference. Heck, even a Java conference. Half the people there have MacBooks, and usually more than half of the speakers. At least far more than Apple's general market share.

Selection bias. People who go to tech conferences make up a tiny share of all the people working in the industry. Plus they're far more likely to look towards other people going to those conferences for "trends" than to the majority who don't, thus reinforcing that bias. Even most designers I know personally don't use macOS. But if I was going by what I see at JS conferences, you'd think Apple has a 99% marketshare (…

As the other commenter noted, RoR precedes iOS third-party development by 5 years. And Macs were already popular among web crowd in the early 2000s. I too got interested in getting a Mac after seeing countless screenshots in CSS books.

Re: Firefox Replay

#86
post #80
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?

This project is advertised on its own domain (not a mozilla.org subdomain) and there's no header/footer/link to mozilla.org. This makes me think that it's not a feature on the roadmap of firefox sponsored by Mozilla, but an experimentation/side project.

The fact that it's in Firefox Nightly seems to blow that hypothesis out of the water

Re: Firefox Replay

#87
As a former gnu/linux user, I see no point to have it on a desktop. Gnu is happy to live under c:/MSYS2, and ‘linux’ part was never good at desktop-home hardware anyway. These 1.77% are barely justified as an option, imo.

Re: Firefox Replay

#88
post #87

As a former gnu/linux user, I see no point to have it on a desktop. Gnu is happy to live under c:/MSYS2, and ‘linux’ part was never good at desktop-home hardware anyway. These 1.77% are barely justified as an option, imo.

After struggling with GPU drivers, again, the last couple of days, I could not agree more!

Re: Firefox Replay

#89
post #87

As a former gnu/linux user, I see no point to have it on a desktop. Gnu is happy to live under c:/MSYS2, and ‘linux’ part was never good at desktop-home hardware anyway. These 1.77% are barely justified as an option, imo.

> As a former gnu/linux user, I see no point to have it on a desktop.

Except, of course, software freedom.

Re: Firefox Replay

#90
post #35

This is a pretty nice comment from the source that explains how it works: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/11d9c7b7fa82fdfb8a... ``` // Recording and replaying works by controlling non-determinism in the browser: // non-deterministic behaviors are initially recorded, then later replayed // exactly to force the browser to behave deterministically. Two types of // non-deterministic behaviors are captured: intr…

Sounds like Mozilla is applying the concepts they developed for their C/C++ debugger, rr (https://rr-project.org).
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