4 ms·

I agree with ndarilek's comment. When the Firebug team started making firebug.next, there were huge problems with the inbuilt dev-tools. They then decided to me

I agree with ndarilek's comment. When the Firebug team started making firebug.next, there were huge problems with the inbuilt dev-tools. They then decided to merge the two projects and stopped developing Firebug. I had expressed my concerns to them after trying the beta for a long time. The team was very receptive of the comments, but sadly not much was implemented until I stopped using FF as my main browser. Even to this date, the Firefox Devtools are nowhere near Chrome's. Yes, there are some very useful features added in Firefox's Devtools but the performance is very poor. Especially the Scripting tab. Try setting a breakpoint in a half-decent webapp - the whole browser(!) hangs for atleast 10 minutes, sometimes forever. There were problems with displaying raw JSON response in the network tab too for a long time - Firebug had the funtionality, so was shocking to see FF drop it in favour of a very clumsy and inaccessible tree view. Then, when FF Quantumcame, I flocked back to FF thinking the devtools would be fixed too. Nope. I have been a long time FF user (I think since v1.5, Netscape before that), and would very much like to use FF as my main browser. But as a web developer, it's impossible to use it. The sheer number of hours wasted just trying to keep my browser to not hang trumps my fanboyism. There is nothing better than what Chrome offers in this area.

chrismorgan 8y ago
I use Firefox’s dev tools for my work on FastMail and Topicbox (the other guy who does the most frontend work uses Chrome). Firefox’s debugger is definitely painfully slow when paused and stepping, but I can’t reproduce what you say about full-browser hangs. Setting a breakpoint completes within a few hundred milliseconds (most of which is just rendering). The fancy JSON thing: if you collapse the “JSON” expander you’ll see another, “Response payload”, which shows it as text. (If JSON is expanded, Response payload may not expand properly; that’s a bug. I haven’t reported it despite knowing about it for a while.) Firefox has been my primary browser since 0.93, save for a year or so on Chrome when I had to run it from a USB stick and Firefox got just too slow there. Nightly has been my daily driver for most of this decade.
- kumarharsh 8y ago
  The JSON thing they have fixed - I think I didn't make it explicitly clear in my comment. But it was that tree view for quite some time after the new devtools revamp. About the full browser hangs - maybe it was my own system, but I usually had Slack and Gmail open. And those tabs already ate a lot of RAM, making FF sluggish. Opening the scripting tab on my own dev site used to make the browser just get stuck. Devtools didn't use to respond either, but clicking on the close button sometimes worked, so I had to hope that I could click on the cross button without triggering the dreaded "This app has stopped responding" dialog.

chrismorgan 8y ago

I use Firefox’s dev tools for my work on FastMail and Topicbox (the other guy who does the most frontend work uses Chrome). Firefox’s debugger is definitely painfully slow when paused and stepping, but I can’t reproduce what you say about full-browser hangs. Setting a breakpoint completes within a few hundred milliseconds (most of which is just rendering). The fancy JSON thing: if you collapse the “JSON” expander you’ll see another, “Response payload”, which shows it as text. (If JSON is expanded, Response payload may not expand properly; that’s a bug. I haven’t reported it despite knowing about it for a while.) Firefox has been my primary browser since 0.93, save for a year or so on Chrome when I had to run it from a USB stick and Firefox got just too slow there. Nightly has been my daily driver for most of this decade.

kumarharsh 8y ago
The JSON thing they have fixed - I think I didn't make it explicitly clear in my comment. But it was that tree view for quite some time after the new devtools revamp. About the full browser hangs - maybe it was my own system, but I usually had Slack and Gmail open. And those tabs already ate a lot of RAM, making FF sluggish. Opening the scripting tab on my own dev site used to make the browser just get stuck. Devtools didn't use to respond either, but clicking on the close button sometimes worked, so I had to hope that I could click on the cross button without triggering the dreaded "This app has stopped responding" dialog.