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The main reason developers prefer chrome over firefox is the devtools hands down. When firebug was amazing in the jquery era, we used firefox but now chrome's d

The main reason developers prefer chrome over firefox is the devtools hands down. When firebug was amazing in the jquery era, we used firefox but now chrome's devtools is simple, fast and full featured to use. If firefox's devtools is as good as or better than chrome's maybe things can change!

manigandham 8y ago
Agreed, the Chrome Devtools are amazing for development and the pace of new features helps in testing new standards.
sunaurus 8y ago
What specifically do you find better in the Chrome devtools? I find Firefox devtools to be slightly nicer (but I don't really think either one has a massive edge over the other).
- vijaybritto 8y ago
  1.speed - FF tools always take time to open a script file. Chrome hickups only for huge files which is understandable. 2. Sourcemaps doesnt work most of the times in webpack bundles. Dont know why. (Maybe they tested only for chrome or something.) 3. This new FF devtools was developed after chrome took the dev mindshare and familiarity. I don't see FF devtools very compelling to be used all the time. No disrespect, but there is no incentive or visible improvement in productivity. 4. I'm a react dev now, the react dev tools plugin in FF is laggy. Not pleasant to use. I can go on like this. But maybe for your use case, FF devtools is better.
  - vorticalbox 8y ago
    one plus to FF is that when you hit an end point that is JSON it actually formats it as JSON rather then just printing to the screen like chrome
- fragkakis 8y ago
  For me the FF dev tools are not as good as Chrome's. For the basics I need both browsers offer the same functionality. However, on my machine, FF has performance problems with the dev tools open. Also, when I rearrange the width of the columns in the network tab, after some seconds and without knowing why, the columns return to their original width.
- xfitm3 8y ago
  Websocket frame inspection in Firefox is not possible.
- 13years 8y ago
  1. speed. On a million+ line code base chrome starts the app in about 5 secs. Firefox over a minute. 2. Blackboxing. Easy to setup and configure in chrome and you can preserve you settings. 3. Blackboxing combined with event breakpoints. Chrome lets you set event break points and combined with black boxing will drop you right into your code on an event. This is awesome.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    Just tried a cold start, Firefox took less than 3 secs to start, granted it's on an SSD. What OS are you using? I've heard it's less optimized on a Mac than on Linux.
    - girvo 8y ago
      They mean starting their web applications javascript
laumars 8y ago
I used to think this too, but After seeing some colleagues using FireFox dev tools and making the switch (back) to Firefox myself, I realised that there really isn’t that much between the two and in fact it’s mire a matter of what you’re used to. Much like the debates about other developer tools in fact (text editors et al).
- lucianoci 8y ago
  It's all the small things. Till recently there weren't even react devtools for Firefox. Almost any dev-oriented extension targets chrome first. Chrome has a great devtools protocol, and node conveniently happens to support it too, which is also why many node debugging tools will use chrome. I use Firefox for casual browsing, but all work-y stuff I do in chrome. Sometimes I'll start debugging a site in Firefox and then some behavior is a bit "off" or missing and I just go back to Chrome. And the only reason I'm using Firefox is because it's not Chrome. I wanted a different browser that looks a bit different to always be aware of the difference between work and personal.
  - PJDK 8y ago
    It really is the small things. The one that gets me constantly is that you can't resize the columns in the Network tab. I appreciate a lot of the stuff Firefox has been doing, but Google was very wise to realise that first class developer support was the winning move.

manigandham 8y ago

Agreed, the Chrome Devtools are amazing for development and the pace of new features helps in testing new standards.

sunaurus 8y ago

What specifically do you find better in the Chrome devtools? I find Firefox devtools to be slightly nicer (but I don't really think either one has a massive edge over the other).

vijaybritto 8y ago
1.speed - FF tools always take time to open a script file. Chrome hickups only for huge files which is understandable. 2. Sourcemaps doesnt work most of the times in webpack bundles. Dont know why. (Maybe they tested only for chrome or something.) 3. This new FF devtools was developed after chrome took the dev mindshare and familiarity. I don't see FF devtools very compelling to be used all the time. No disrespect, but there is no incentive or visible improvement in productivity. 4. I'm a react dev now, the react dev tools plugin in FF is laggy. Not pleasant to use. I can go on like this. But maybe for your use case, FF devtools is better.
- vorticalbox 8y ago
  one plus to FF is that when you hit an end point that is JSON it actually formats it as JSON rather then just printing to the screen like chrome
fragkakis 8y ago
For me the FF dev tools are not as good as Chrome's. For the basics I need both browsers offer the same functionality. However, on my machine, FF has performance problems with the dev tools open. Also, when I rearrange the width of the columns in the network tab, after some seconds and without knowing why, the columns return to their original width.
xfitm3 8y ago
Websocket frame inspection in Firefox is not possible.
13years 8y ago
1. speed. On a million+ line code base chrome starts the app in about 5 secs. Firefox over a minute. 2. Blackboxing. Easy to setup and configure in chrome and you can preserve you settings. 3. Blackboxing combined with event breakpoints. Chrome lets you set event break points and combined with black boxing will drop you right into your code on an event. This is awesome.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  Just tried a cold start, Firefox took less than 3 secs to start, granted it's on an SSD. What OS are you using? I've heard it's less optimized on a Mac than on Linux.
  - girvo 8y ago
    They mean starting their web applications javascript

laumars 8y ago

I used to think this too, but After seeing some colleagues using FireFox dev tools and making the switch (back) to Firefox myself, I realised that there really isn’t that much between the two and in fact it’s mire a matter of what you’re used to. Much like the debates about other developer tools in fact (text editors et al).

lucianoci 8y ago
It's all the small things. Till recently there weren't even react devtools for Firefox. Almost any dev-oriented extension targets chrome first. Chrome has a great devtools protocol, and node conveniently happens to support it too, which is also why many node debugging tools will use chrome. I use Firefox for casual browsing, but all work-y stuff I do in chrome. Sometimes I'll start debugging a site in Firefox and then some behavior is a bit "off" or missing and I just go back to Chrome. And the only reason I'm using Firefox is because it's not Chrome. I wanted a different browser that looks a bit different to always be aware of the difference between work and personal.
- PJDK 8y ago
  It really is the small things. The one that gets me constantly is that you can't resize the columns in the Network tab. I appreciate a lot of the stuff Firefox has been doing, but Google was very wise to realise that first class developer support was the winning move.