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Firefox Replay

firefox-replay.com

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Re: Firefox Replay

#91

Post by tiborsaas »

aedron wrote: 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?

It sounds super handy for the hard to catch bugs that happen let's say 5-10% of the time and the bug might be originating from a wrong event or still hanging event listener.

If your app is something that takes time to react on events to unroll, then this could save you lots of time. I made a music player and just by the nature of timed events it took quite a long time to catch edge cases I did not foresee in the prototyping phase.

Re: Firefox Replay

#92

Post by isatty »

porker wrote: post #70
dmos62 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Is MacOS this popular in the Web frontend crowd? Yes, and seemingly in the web backend crowd too (Ruby, PHP, Python but not as much AFAICT). If you go to a web conference and don't pull out a Mac, you do get comments and/or questions (depending if you're running Windows or Linux). At Python conferences I've seen fewer Macs and more of the good old ThinkPads running Linux. My feeling is that community has a more "Co…

> My feeling is that community has a more "Computer sciencey" taste in laptops, because they're not all web programmers.

Or maybe just because they _can_ be bothered to spend a few days setting up their laptop just right and actively maintain it.

I'm a fairly advanced user but I can't be bothered to do so on a laptop and would rather have a Mac to carry around and GNU/Linux on my desktop.

Re: Firefox Replay

#93

Post by nemetroid »

aedron wrote: post #83
Vinnl wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

That Stack Overflow answer is poorly worded though, looking at an outer stack frame is really nothing like going back in time. Going back in time in the Firefox Replay sense means reversing execution of the program, e.g. to find the values of variables that have been mutated or gone out of scope.

Re: Firefox Replay

#94

Post by tenryuu »

Regarding Mac OS: looks like, on Windows FF Developer Edition I can access it's UI from creating a boolean in about:config named devtools.recordreplay.enabled

A new option in settings will be added to enable a Toolbox Button named "Enable WebReplay", but pressing that button will replace the entire tab content with an about:blank

Re: Firefox Replay

#96

Post by Etheryte »

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 useful, but I'm sure I would've been (and will be) very thankful for it.

Re: Firefox Replay

#97

Post by akvadrako »

wruza wrote: 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.

True, Linux on desktop sucks out of the box. But Windows and Mac suck and it’s not possible to make them good. Personally, I just switched back to Linux after 10 years on Mac. It’s a rough start but now it’s better than Mac and I can continue building the environment I want.

Re: Firefox Replay

#98

Post by jakobegger »

scarface74 wrote: post #71
bad_user wrote: post #55

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…

You can't talk about Chrome's market share without mentioning that it was (maybe still is? I don't know) prominently advertised on the google.com homepage.

Everyone who went to search Google saw the ad. It said something like "Try a faster browser"

The fact that Chrome was advertised on the most popular page in the world, and especially that it was the only ad on that page, definitely made a difference in adoption.

The quality of the dev tools has nothing to do with it.

Re: Firefox Replay

#99

Post by unityByFreedom »

scarface74 wrote: post #71
bad_user wrote: post #55

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…

All geeks don't hate FB and Apple. Your vantage point may be too far. Chrome's dev tools did have a lot to do with its rise in use among devs.

Re: Firefox Replay

#100

Post by asaddhamani »

I would love to give Firefox a shot, but there's one thing I've had issues with, when working with projects using things like webpack, when there's an error, Chrome links me back to the original file and line, I never seem to be able to do this in Firefox. Makes it so much harder to debug things. Am I doing something wrong, or is there a way to fix this?
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