I have another bit of feedback. The web console has three positions available: Above, Below, and Window. With Firebug, I like to have the console open in another monitor and give the browser viewport maximum screen real estate in front of me. Firefox's web console doesn't let me do this because in "Window" mode it doesn't quite act the same as a fully-fledged window. For example, I can't maximise it and it doesn't have the full complement of normal controls in its window bar. http://i.imgur.com/V7eWC1m.png
Thanks... just realized that thanks to you.. have to long-click on the dock/window icon to switch modes to side/bottom dock. Not quite intuitive, but wouldn't have tried if not for your comment.
My apologies, I remember in the original post you asked us to hold off on providing feedback unless the issues were present in recent Firefox versions. On the plus side, this motivated me to switch to Firefox Aurora just now and I must say, I'm extremely impressed!
I've been using Aurora for the past few weeks, and really enjoy it quite a bit. I'd been using Chrome for the past few years, but the recent shenanigans by Google was enough to motivate me to take a few more steps away...
I've been using Aurora for the past year or so, and haven't look back much. Occasionally I'll switch back to Chrome, but that's only when something in Aurora or nightly is broken.
While right-side docking is great, especially for widescreen monitors, separate window for devtools would be much better improvement. In this case anyone can 'dock' them any way they like it. More important, you can have dev tools on one screen and page view on another.
A wire-protocol for debugging/live reload/etc. would be awesome, but especially if it's cross-browser! As an IDE developer, I shouldn't have to do one thing for Chrome, and one thing for FF, just to support the same operations (like set debug point, step in, step out, etc.).
Obviously, yes, they'll be a different set of features at first, but for the overlapping ones, the wire protocol should be the same.
Just look at how painful things were for Selenium/Webdriver; which I now see is moving into the W3C. Hopefully that makes their lives (and our lives as developers) easier if the browsers share a protocol.
I've personally internalized the downdown for going to things I've gone to before.
However, I do brand new searches constantly. Often 20+ a day, that often look similar to older searches, but aren't quite.
Now, whether I've developed that behavior because of Chrome, or because it works well for me, is a question for itself.
Also, since I'm here- anyone get frequent fuckups lately in the Chrome omnibar, not searching what you put in, to instead search something you HAVE searched before?
For example, before, I've searched "javascript array"
But this time, I am wanting to search "javascript string concatenation". I type that into Chrome, hit enter...
...up pops the search results for "javascript array". It started about a month ago, and is really annoying.
> It started about a month ago, and is really annoying.
Yes, I have been encountering the same behavior. It is infuriating because it's impossible to tell when this is going to happen. This is separate from pulling up different searches I've used before, this bug seems to be something like "ignore what you type completely".
In Firefox, the hotkey "cmd-K" will put focus into the search bar at the top.
In Chrome they don't have a keybind set to this by default (though on Windows they seem to). But if you open mac System Preferences, go to Keyboard, then Keyboard Shortcuts, and add an Application Shortcut for Chrome, you set the menu item name to "Search the Web..." and the keybind to whatever you want (I used "cmd-K").
So that way regardless if I'm in Firefox or chrome, pressing cmd-K will put me in a place I can search.
I've noticed frequently Google Instant will fail half way through searching, and it will ignore everything I typed and just go with what Instant guessed before it crapped out.
If Instant is prioritizing your previous search, it may be linked.
Also, putting "* " in the awesomebar before typing searches your search string limits the results to bookmarks. Here is a list of these prefixes:
Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks.
Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged.
Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs.
Add ~ to search for matches in pages you've typed.
Add # to search for matches in page titles.
Add @ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).
I am surprised not a lot of people at HN do this. Disabling predictive service is one of the first things I do after installing chrome on a new machine. Something about sending every keystroke made on the omnibar to Google makes me feel uneasy, it could also be the paranoid in me talking.
So that's why every time I start typing a reddit url, Chrome suggests I visit http://www.reddit.com/r/gone wild (sic, with the space in there).
There are a number of reasons why they really need to rethink this, default it off, or do some better filtering. Didn't impact me personally beyond the confusion but I could imagine that URL and maybe some others coming up in what appears to be someone's unique search or browsing history raising some interesting questions at work and/or at home for some users.
Aurelio's used to have amazing pizza before the original owners sold it and it became a franchise. Don't waste your money, there's plenty of better options.
Also, I agree with you regarding Chrome's Google search priorities.
I appreciate this feature on mobile as it can help save me some more time-consuming taps, but I don't use it on Chrome since I can type faster than I can browse through the results it's guessing at.
yeah and you can get chrome behavior in ff in the search bar, too. well except for the bug of course. The ff search bar does search for what you typed, not what you typed last. (and does shows instant results, too) best of both worlds.
Perhaps so, but it still seems unscientific. I even left out that an even better test would be if you had identical history in both browsers (which I know would be inconvenient to set up). I honestly do not understand why I am being downvoted.
Like sergiotapia, I'm very close to switching back to FireFox /because/ of the Awesomebar. However, for me, it's because it matches my search history better. Let's say I'm working on a page call /editor/?id=1234, in FireFox, typing 1234 will show that page as the first match, whereas Chrome doesn't even match it unless I start typing /editor/, and sometimes even the root domain. It's very frustrating.
HackerNews is the best example for me. In firefox, I can type in y, and it will know that I want news.ycombinator.com. In Chrome, the only way to have it autocomplete (at least the last time I tried it) was to start with n.
I prefer Firefox Awesomebar as I find that when I type something in to search my browsing history it usually returns what I was looking for.. Chrome not so much. EDIT: what sergiotapia said ^^^
I removed search box from Firefox few months ago and never looked back. I use search engine keywords instead[1]. My current keywords include goog, bing, amzn, crate, and wiki. Guess what search engine they refer to. :)
I really, really prefer the search box. For me, searching the web and searching my history are very different intents; so activating them with different keystrokes doesn't seem like much of a burden.
I did too, but Google instant changed things. Try this:
1) Set your search engine to Google (if it isn't currently)
2) Remove the search bar.
3) Press ctrl+k (cmd+k) and start typing. You'll be searching on Google's site, by far the best search experience with Google Instant on.
The only downside is that you need a reasonably fast, low-latency connection for it to work well[1].
[1] Fine with decent Internet service, but what a downside it is on a lesser connection. The ~0.5-1 sec delay was unbearable on a 3Mbps DSL connection with average latency.
There's a Firefox addon called Instantfox [1] which makes the Awesomebar behave somewhat more like the Omnibar. Possibly too much so, depending on your preferences.
I preferred Chrome's Omnibar to Firefox's AwesomeBar as well, but then I found this FF add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/. One advantage I have always preferred with FireFox is that it's add-ons can have tighter integration with the browser than Chrome's extensions. In example, one such add-on that Chrome can't do is FireFox's Last-Tab add-on. It lets you switch between tabs in the order they were used. After getting used to that work flow, I have a hard time using any browser other than FF. To me, Firefox seems more extensible than Chrome.
Chrome's Omnibar constantly auto-completes searches I did earlier in the day and week, so that I often have to press delete before enter. And there is no settings toggle to turn this off.
(I'm not talking about the completion dropdown or what it contains, I'm talking about how the typed text in the input area has selected text appended to it when it happens to be a prefix for an earlier search.)
Between this, the lack of tree style tabs, and the weird text selection algorithm, I'm generally sticking with Firefox.
I like how Firefox completes the site I want with only typing 1 or 2 characters in the address bar.
Also Firefox has a separate search bar that supports plugins (dictionaries, CPAN and stuff like that)
How about opening up a browser-based API for existing in-browser IDE-like environments to leverage the debugging tools that are already present?
What I am talking about is instead of recreating jsFiddle in the dev tools, how about letting jsFiddle (with appropriate user confirmation) control the dev tools?
As the creator of Plunker (http://beta.plnkr.co/edit/e5iLyQ?p=preview), I would love to be able to leverage the environment that has already been created to allow adding breakpoints and inspecting of running code. Since Plunker already has live-previewing and a working multi-file editing interface, it would be really amazing to be able to take it to the next level.
Shameless plug: If you've never heard of Plunker, check it out. For free you get live-reload of previews, transparent compilation (and sourcemapping) of stuff like Coffee-Script, Typescript, Stylus, etc.., real-time collaboration on the same code, live js/css linting and much more! Also, it is open-source (http://github.com/filearts/).
What I understood from your article is that you're mostly exploring 1) the possibility of opening up the dev tools to locally-installed applications like SublimeText2; and 2) the integration of jsFiddle-like apps within DevTools.
Please correct me if I misunderstood.
What I'm asking about is creating an in-browser API for a website to interact with the dev tools. Obviously, this would require a very thorough review of the risks of having such an API from a security perspective (and how users can opt-in in a transparent and well-controlled manner). That being said, I am still hoping!
If this is already in the books, then Hooray! I can't wait to start experimenting.
I hope I didn't come across poorly, because I really appreciate all the work you've been doing!
So - Firefox exposes a tcp-based protocol (not enabled by default. The user will need to go to a special tool to start the server). It will expose feature like adding break points, exploring the DOM and the CSS rules, and editing content (CSS/HTML/JS).
So external tools can connect to Firefox. But this protocol is not accessible from a page. But we could imagine using a websocket instead of a normal tcp socket, and let the web page connect to ws://localhost.
Stretch goal: How about having an in-browser API that could create such a websocket?
That would open some interesting possibilities in terms of remote debugging by piping socket traffic over another socket/WebRTC datachannel as well as allowing websites to interact with the debugger.
Allowing websites to interact with the Debugger API is something we would like to do, but, as you note, the security implications require much more thought to get it right.
One small thing that I haven't seen yet (in FF or Chrome) is a feature where I could get the IP address that was used to retrieve a given resource in the network tab. This would be hugely helpful when dealing with sites that are backed by more than one server. Also, ability to reset DNS cache (BTW, DNS cache seems to be shared between private and regular browsing modes).
<edit>The ability to lock onto a specific IP for a given domain would be pretty kick-ass too. Not a replacement for /etc/hosts, but just choosing one of the 2 IP's for example.com, etc.</edit>
Another nice feature would be to get the network tab to ignore resources loaded from external domains, only show external resources, or show both. Maybe even more fine grained with/without subdomains.
Really nice you are listening and responding to the community this well, that said the progress made during hack week is impressive but we'll have to see how fast and stable these suggestions leak through to nightlies and stable release.
Keep up the stellar work, firefox is gaining momentum again, make good use of it :)
What a stellar response to feedback. Thank you Mozilla. I'm currently a big Chrome Dev Tools fan, but I, er, am currently thinking of that beautiful girl I ditched again, if you know what I mean...
I still don't get it way mozilla made it's own devtools, instead of integrating and extending on firebug. Had the devs of mozilla and the one of firebug diffs, which couldn't be solved?
The #1 thing the Firefox DevTools group should be doing is integrating Firebug into Firefox. Right now they have the same team maintaining two codebases. That seems like a significant waste of time.
I kind of disagree, I would rather see Firefox DevTools not be Firebug. Firebug is not that great (compared to Chrome's debug tools) due to its UI. It looks like Firefox DevTools is at least going for a much better UI, so being constrained by Firebug would be a loss.
-has more glitches (things doing plain weird or not working sometimes)
-requires "activation" of each panel and reloading of the page
-sometimes suddenly opens for no reason when you visit a webpage without the intention to debug it
-is impossible to use if you want to debug a project with hundreds of js files (e.g. uncompiled JS of a large project) because it has a bad type of dropdown for selecting the JS file
-generally just requires more clicks and more frustration to get things done
The one in Chrome:
-is faster
-has a better console (easier to type commands, inspect variables, etc...)
-works immediately as soon as you open it (no "this panel was inactive during page load")
-has more features
Note that I was talking about Firebug here. Firefox also has its own dev tools, at least an "Inspect Element", with even a 3D view of a page allowing to see divs outside of it and so on, and that one is awesome!
I'm curious from your side (maybe also to learn a thing or two about Firebug): How would you compare it to Chrome? What features make Firebug stand out?
Thanks.
EDIT: Why do I need to add multiple newlines between the "-" to make Hacker News post them as newlines?
This is unfortunately true, and that's why it's exciting to see Mozilla do something about it. As it stands right now, Chrome is the better tool, and if you prefer Firebug to it chances are you haven't tried Chrome for long enough.
It proves that they are developing functionality that I've been looking for and some I didn't even know I wanted.
It is evidence that they want to be a great tool for developers and that they recognize their tool needs work.
It proves that I made the right decision (completely subjective which is the nature of a comment like the one I made) in moving away from Google for a more user centered and open-source browser.
And yes it proves that they listen to their users.
All of that is assuming they weren't lying or creating fake mockups (which I feel is a safe bet). Sure that's not a lot of proof for a scientific theory, but for a decision on which browser I want to use and which company I want to support I think it's proof enough :-)
Excellent, the network timeline is one of the features that has kept me on Firebug. The editor integration looks quite intriguing as well. Wonderfully rapid response, Paul! I may no longer have an excuse not to use the built-in dev tools. :)
In order to get to that modal message, you first have to go and enable remote debugging, which is not something normal people would do. And in general, even though we can (and already have) come up with even more mitigations for the potential threat, the sad truth is that security and usability are fundamentally a tradeoff, so you have to strike a balance at some point.
And, I understand that. But, the drawbacks of the security implications of your development/developer browsers being thus weakened is, IMO, a decision heavily weighted in favour _against_ this feature.
Personally, I would love it. It would make my life easier to have a full IDE within a browser. However, I would never be comfortable with the security tradeoff and would never enable it.
- Allow to use a dark theme on all panels. I remember that for a short time, aurora had the dark themes on the html, css panels. It was great, but then it was reverted to the white background. It would be cool if there were a setting to choose the dark color theme. I loved it.
- Add something like firepath. A firebug extension, that adds a panel to test CSS/sizzle (jquery) selectors, and highlights the selected nodes. This is an extremely useful extension for me. If enough people agree, it would be good to have it integrated in the developer tools by default.
Brilliant. A friend and I were just talking about how cumbersome it's to work on a dark themed website using Firebug due to the default burn-your-eyes bright contrast bleeding into the site.
I was impressed by their question, and now even more so by incredibly quick results! I switched back to Firefox a few days ago (from Chrome) and this really solidifies my decision.
Thank you for opening up to this community. For better or worse, I feel the HN crowd has it's head together and will always give good feedback on products.
On re-reading, I've now realized polskibus was referring to sublime as a tool which IS available cross platform.
Like the downvoted comment I too initially read it as that he thought it WAS NOT cross platform based on thee here he postitioned his example near his Apple comment and hence why the 'sublime is available cross platform' comment made good sense to me.
Are there any plans to implement an instrumenting profiler in addition to the existing one? Not having call count is a huge minus for me. Devtools has a sampling profiler like Chrome (which also doesnt provide call counts). So the only instrumenting profilers remaining for JS on Windows are Firebug and an outdated, abandoned version of Safari :(
Wow. I haven't had a chance to read the article yet, but the video where they are editing live in sublime text is awesome. Does this have to open in a new file or can it override an existing file?
It'd be really cool to be able to do the latter. I usually make changes in chrome dev tools and then copy the results into the relevant CSS file.
You might be interested in checking out Brackets (http://brackets.io/) which has some live development capabilities for CSS at least right now. I believe it only works with Chrome though, currently.
Very excited to see the network panel, as that is what makes me go back to Chrome or Firebug most often.
In the network panel, being able to sorting/filter requests by content-type, request verb, and response code makes it much more usable for me. I didn't see that in the video-- do you plan to include it?
"Coding/authoring in the browser" - this is EXACTLY the idea of LIVEditor, my code editor project which was started before Bret Victor's talk, the announcing of Light Table and Brackets.
But it's not out yet, because it's only me working on it...
Making Firebug into an extension that works inside the Firefox dev tools (the same way Firebug plugins can add tabs) sounds like the best way to move forward both Firefox and Firebug.
Mozilla can't kill Firebug, even if they wanted, since it's a separate open source project and community. And the only people with two inspectors would be those that elected to have them both, by installing Firebug and using both tools.
I was one of those that requested a way to profile repaints. Thank you for adding the aggregate repaint view. The video showing the margin-left vs. transform repaints is exactly the kind of thing developers can take advantage of.
Question: does the aggregate repaint view indicate what caused the repaint? Determining that isn't always as easy or obvious as the margin-left vs. transform example in the video, so it'd be a huge benefit if that was included.
It's amazing how much I respect Mozilla as an organization.
First, they revolutionized browsers when none of the big players wanted to. Then they promoted open standards. And as of lately they have been championing developers with tools to succeed.
This post confirms that they are actively engaging and working with their community to build a better product. What if we all did that? Lets replace "brainstorming" with "brainsourcing".
Mozilla does encourage community to give their ideas. There a zillion projects going on at Mozilla that would die for some constructive thinking help, although not all get the same attention.
That's also while I like organizations. No matter how people go at Mozilla saying they don't listen.. it's not quite true. Decisions will never satisfy absolutely everybody, but they listen and ask for tips quite a lot.
The jsfiddle style looks good, but how does that work with multiple files on the page? Do you select the files you want to work with?
Not sure if it's possible, but I think it'd be cool to highlight which lines have been live edited.
One bit of feedback about editing CSS: it'd be great if, when editing a property, using the arrow keys cycled through the default properties. I.e. border-style goes through solid, dotted, none, etc.
I would like to see more standardized keyboard shortcuts. F12 is generally used to open the dev tools in most browsers (including opening FireBug). Another shortcut I'd like to see is Ctr+G to goto line in the scripts debugger.
I'd also like to see an improvement of the default source in the debugger pane. Guessing the proper script on the page that needs debugging can be a huge time saver.
The timeline needs to show protocol. Btw this already exists in Firebug. Why duplicate effort? I'm sure this hass been asked before. But why have devtools instead of improving firebug? (Performance?) What will happen to firebug in the long run ?
Edit:
* In inspect view, can we have a search HTML function like firebug?
* Also in inspect view, a way to disable the display of PATH.
Poking around the wiki I noticed that work is beginning on GCLI, a gui command line. I'm not sure how it's going to get integrated into FF yet (I saw mention of an mdn command, though).
And one more for the Chrome "Resources" tab. I am now trying to develop FFOS app with IndexedDB and not being able to see the content of the database makes me run to Chrome all the time.
I'm loving all of this. With these improvements, I have only one complaint. The tab bar is beautiful on Windows and OS X, but it's awful on Linux. Tabs should be the same on each OS.
This is awesome. Was thinking the last few days that I wanted to switch back to FF from Chrome but that the dev tools were the only thing keeping me around. Nice work!
Not that i hate these tools, but how much would this bloat up the browser? ( I am guessing they are less then a few MBs on installation size or download size? )
All I want is a build-in user-agent over-ride option in the web or dev console. Let me specify pre-bundled popular UA's in drop-drown or custom UA string.
That is why the decision has not been made yet, they are discussing. Every user has different preferences, and maybe you will get to have both the options :)
How many devs actually use Firefox's dev tools? I see all of that praise "looks awesome, looks amazing, etc" But do people really use those amazing things? I just find the Chrome dev tools orders of magnitude more usable than Firefox's. It's mostly a large amount of what you could call details but it makes all the difference. It all flows better, reduces the amount of thinking you have to do as well as the number of clicks and keypresses. I think Mozilla should start by fixing all of these little problems before jumping into huge stuff like they seem to like to do with the cli, python library etc.
I'm not sure. On topic, could you enumerate some of the specific areas where the Chrome tools "flow" better? I've pretty exclusively been a Fx dev. tool user for the past few months, so I'm personally not sure how things are on that side these days.
I find the responses here really strange, has anyone here actually used the devtools in pratice? The firefox devtools seem to me just a awful waste of time from the beginning, they are years behind the competition and the development progress is so slow that I've given up on them. I'm using firefox as my main browser but for web development (dom/css inspection, javascript debugging) there is currently nothing that beats the chrome devtools.
> there is currently nothing that beats the chrome devtools.
That's the point of this post. It's that pretty soon, Firefox is going to have much improved devtools. They include some features that interest us greatly.
It's hard to pinpoint one thing. They're just much more usable and don't make you fight against it. It just gets out of your way. That's great UX design right there. Just measure the amount of key strokes, clicks, time and overall actions needed to do one thing in Chrome and the same in Firefox. You'll be amazed.
I would hope or presume that Firefox's tools eventually do get this level of polish, though. Chrome (and even Safari) has had quite a bit of a head-start, and neither of those were shining examples of great UX at the beginning.
Sure, let me try by comparing it to the competition: the firefox devtools, firebug and opera inspector (I haven't used anything else). I'm using the chrome devtools for DOM inspection (HTML and SVG), CSS development and debugging, javascript repl and debugging (and via node-inspector also for server-side debugging) and HTTP profiling and protocol debugging. So I'm using it primarily for web development but its also an invaluable tool for web scraping where you can just copy&paste xpath expressions from the dom inspector for instance.
The Opera Developer Tools (Opera Dragonfly): The UX is done well, the markup editor works even better than in chrome and I like the screenshot utility and color picker. The css inspection is inconvenient when you want to change properties or add new rules. The network log is done well but the UX can become confusing, the make request feature is exceptional I don't know any other devtool that has that integrated. No xpath in the dom inspector.
Firebug: This was the first browser devtool afaik so it has a long history and years of development behind it, I always considered it to be "the firefox developer tools" and I was really surprised when mozilla announced they would recreate it on their own instead of just integrating firebug. But I guess they have their reasons.
Firebug has a great UX, everything is fast and polished although it has become a little old, it still integrates nicely in the current firefox UI. The dom and css inspector is great, it allows to quickly change anything you ever want, with the exception maybe that you cannot add new css rules (only element styles). The network inspector is exceptional, best of all 4. I don't like the console/REPL but its alright. Overall still my second favorite.
Chrome Developer Tools: Provides by far the best UX and is clearly the most powerful devtool around. Its also the only reason why I have chrome installed, my main browser is and was always firefox. The css inspector is just great, you can update or add new rules and properties and it has great auto completion. I don't like the dom editor through, the edit as html feature lacks a bit. Javascript debugging and the console work exceptionally well and you can even edit and save your code within the devtools. It has HTML5 builtin features for web workers, indexedDB, local storage, etc. You also can use it to debug nodejs applications through node-inspector.
Firefox Developer Tools: I must admit, I don't even know where to begin. The UX is just awful: From the alien dark-blue that doesn't integrate at all with the rest of firefox and the font sizes that you can't change to the strange dropdown menu/button combinations in the latest version. The DOM inspector doesn't allow you to edit html directly, has no xpath and the css inspector is confusing and doesn't has autocompletion. There is no resources overview, no networking debugging and profiling.
I do however acknowledge there is some progress in the latest snapshots, I like the scratchpad, style editor and the UI overhaul made it a bit more usable. There are still no settings, still no way to change the dark theme. I don't say it isn't making some progress, but its so slow (they say they need a few months for the python api alone), that chrome will have progressed well beyond and I don't see them catching up.
I have another bit of feedback. The web console has three positions available: Above, Below, and Window. With Firebug, I like to have the console open in another monitor and give the browser viewport maximum screen real estate in front of me. Firefox's web console doesn't let me do this because in "Window" mode it doesn't quite act the same as a fully-fledged window. For example, I can't maximise it and it doesn't have the full complement of normal controls in its window bar. http://i.imgur.com/V7eWC1m.png