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Firefox debuts new developer toolbar
- james33 14y agoI'm really pleased to see that Mozilla is finally stepping up to the plate and trying to bring web developers back into the fold that have been enjoying the much better Webkit dev tools. I hope they continue with this momentum.
- welder 14y agoThat's great! It's much better than the prev Firefox dev toolbar. I wonder if people will take the time to learn the Firefox specific console commands?
- senorcastro 14y agoI might be more impressed if I didn't use FireBug.
- ttaubert 14y agoWhat do you mean? It doesn't use Firebug at all.
- CrazedGeek 14y agoHe means that Firebug is better than this new toolbar in his opinion.
- ttaubert 14y agoOh, I misread that. Well, apples and oranges.
- fletchowns 14y agoThey aren't mutually exclusive, they complement each other. At the end of the video, using the new developer toolbar, he enables Firebug, and shows off that there are now Firebug specific commands that have been added to the toolbar.
- pjmlp 14y agoSame here, but now I wonder what the FireBug developers will do.
- acomjean 14y agowonder if it will play nice with pentadactyl or vimperator or any other of the keyboard based browsing add-ons. Looks good though.
- callahad 14y agoFavorite feature of the dev toolbar: it has a "screenshot" command to dump a PNG of either the entire page or a specific block.
- ed209 14y agoIs this one better than the extensions that already existed for taking screenshots?
- no_news_is 14y agoDon't know about parent poster, but I think: a) It's better to have it baked into the browser in general, if it's something you use. Worse if it's not, though. b) Screenshots with selectors are pretty awesome, and I don't think most extensions would provide that
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoWhich extension are your referencing. I'm currently using Page Saver but previously used Awesome Screenshot Plus until they started intercepting pages and spamming adverts to them by default. Having it in-browser is good. Also I've not seen a screenshot tool that allowed an id to be specified before as someone said this will/does.
- dioltas 14y agoI use this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pixlr-grabber/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pixlr-grabber... Allows you to capture a defined region or the entire page, and upload / edit it online.
- state 14y agoIt's really nice to see an approach that's different not just in UI but in concept. Smart.
- cicloid 14y agoLately Firefox started looking more atractive again. Mostly because of Chrome's feature creep. But probably I'm just overthinking it.
- sumone4life 14y agoMade the switch today because of this, and a few other features and improvements since I last used firefox.
- st3fan 14y agoWhat improvements did you like most?
- sumone4life 14y agoThe developer toolbar mostly. I do a good amount of web dev so its helpful. Taking pdf screenshots with a single command has come in handy. Also the 3D view is gimmicky but pretty awesome. Tab groups is another favorite. There still seems to be some sort of memory leakage though. I have to shut down the browser every so often to clear out the 3GB of ram it suddenly decided it needed to have.
- state 14y agoI agree. There's something good going on over there. Seems like it's a good thing to be under pressure from Chrome.
- ch0wn 14y ago> Mostly because of Chrome's feature creep. I think I'm actually quite sensitive to that, but haven't felt about Chrome that way yet. Could you explain what features you mean in particular?
- azakai 14y agoSome things Chrome includes that other browsers do not: Pepper, Native Client, Chrome Web Store, WebSQL (Safari might have that one too), a native PDF viewer, SwiftShader, etc. (People of course disagree on which of those are bad and which are good.)
- no_news_is 14y agoReminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox) Tying this down to the specific domain of web development will probably help its longevity though. I'm very excited about the add-your-own feature and hope it's similar.
- codemac 14y agoIf you have a HiDPI display (ips or retina mac), Jonathon Kew's patchset to add this feature to Firefox has landed in the Aurora branch. http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-aurora/ http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/lates... There are 18a2 builds in there, I'm using it now! However, I haven't seen it mentioned on the main aurora release page, so proceed with caution.
- cpeterso 14y agoFirefox's lack of HiDPI support was killing my eyes, but I've been using Nightly builds and they look great. The only problem I see is that Flash plugins get confused about screen sizes (so YouTube has tiny control buttons).
- codemac 14y agoThe plugin support hasn't bothered me yet, and it's almost surprising. The amount of flash I use on a daily basis is so incredibly minimal these days. I've started using the built in plugin blocking with firefox. The only time I really turn it on is for Netflix and the occasional video that isn't part of the HTML5 beta on youtube is about it. ( not that any of this is an excuse to not fix the bug :P )
- leif 14y agonetflix is silverlight, not flash, though this is tangential to your point
- lukeschlather 14y agoI usually start up a Chrome private browsing tab for Flash stuff, and use Firefox for most other stuff.
- mushishi 14y agoAs Google Chromes GWT Developer plugin is noticeably slower (and stopped working altogether) than that of Firefox's, having to use non-retina supported browser for GWT development is annoying.
- nsmartt 14y agoIf Firefox had a GUI that didn't rely on the window manager's decorations (a la chrome), I would switch in a heartbeat. As it stands, using Firefox on Linux (Openbox) feels like a huge step back from Chrome.
- thristian 14y agoThat's interesting. Chrome's lack-of-integration with the rest of my desktop is one of the things that keeps me away.
- nsmartt 14y agoOn Linux, Chrome has an option to use system decorations. Does it lack that option on other systems?
- oftenwrong 14y agoIn what way does it rely on the WM's decorations?
- nsmartt 14y agoI misspoke. Most programs use system decorations, but I do prefer the way Chrome has an option to use its own alternative.
- Spittie 14y agoYou can probably get something like chrome using "Hide Caption Titlebar Plus" (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/hide-caption-titlebar-plus-sma/ https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/hide-caption-tit...) to hide the titlebar and put the windows button directly into the window. You can even use Stylish to customize those button (so they'll fit your theme).
- petepete 14y agoSorry, am I missing something - Why use Openbox if you don't like the window decorations?
- danneu 14y agoThe shortcut to bring it up (fn+shift+f2) is pretty unwieldy on the Mac keyboard. Anyone have any idea on how to change the shortcut? No luck in about:config.
- cpeterso 14y agoYou can remap individual applications' keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences > Keyboard settings. For this case, the keyboard shortcut should remap the menu item "Developer Toolbar". I like to remap CMD+Q to something harmless like "Hide Others" to avoid accidentally quitting apps. :)
- antidoh 14y agoYou can also get at the menubar through the keyboard: alt-T W v which looks a little unwieldy, except you don't have to move from the home keys, and I find it much easier to type than hands up, look for fn, left middle to shift and left index to fn, right middle float up and over to f2 You can muscle memory a short menubar keyboard sequence pretty quickly if you use it enough.
- gizzlon 14y agoIsn't it really just "shift+f2" ? But your keyboard doesn't have an f2 key, so you have to press "fn" to get "f2" ? Of course that doesn't help you, but this has annoyed me on mac, and I think they deserve the blame ;)
- BHSPitMonkey 14y agoWho downscales a screencast to 480p before uploading to YouTube? It would be a much better demo to watch if they hadn't.
- zobzu 14y agocan't read what he's typing indeed
- sesqu 14y agoBe sure to watch in 480p, not 360p. I can make out what he's typing, though it is a bit blurry. Plus, if you only care about the commands, he always mentions them - just not all of the parameters.
- befuddled 14y agoCaptioning would have been nice too - the YouTube auto-generated ones are, as ever, gibberish: http://imgur.com/kKgPc http://imgur.com/kKgPc
- mariusmg 14y agoShift + F2 opens the command line but pressing Shift +F2 again doesn't close it. That's.....unexpected (and annoying).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- polarix 14y agoAh, do they finally have a debugger again?
- past 14y agoYes, since Firefox 15.
- zanny 14y agoAs a guy who writes software who doesn't write much html (because web is hard) I can't help but feel that having all these devtools built in by default, while nice for developers, seems silly to have wasting space on the hard drives of millions of users. They will never use the source viewers, live editing, page heuristics, etc, and it reeks of feature creep to me, and one product trying to be too many things at once.
- tikhonj 14y agoIt may be a waste of space, yes, but space is cheap. Also, it is extremely valuable to have these tools on every browser I happen to use. I can see what's wrong with my website--or anybody's website--at any computer. If you go to some page and something doesn't work, I can just open the developer tools on your browser and try to sort it out. So while most people don't need these tools most of the time, they can still be useful once in a while and have a negligible cost.
- RobAley 14y agoSome stats: ~350 million users[1] ~17Mb download[2] Lets assume a full 25% is dev tools (I think its likely to be much less), so 4.25Mb per user. That's 1418Tb, or just under 500 3Tb disks. Considering that's spread across 350 million users, I think that's not too much at all, and its probably much less. [1]https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/e/ed/Analyst_report_Q1_2010.pdf https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/e/ed/Analyst_report_Q1_2010.... [2]http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html
- gioele 14y ago> seems silly to have wasting space on the hard drives of millions of users. I'd be more worried about memory consumption, wasted CPU cycles, lost opportunities to let the CPU sleep, the cost of running CI tests... I am also worried about the increase in the attack surface exposed to random pages downloaded from the Web.
- mikeratcliffe 14y ago
- jmcejuela 14y agoBig congrats to the Mozilla team. Lately they haven't stopped releasing new great things: Persona, lljs, WebPlatform (co-participation), now this developer command bar, ... sth else? Impressive.
- 89a 14y agoJesus christ, Firefox is the definition of "over designed"
- qoo 14y agoTried the CSS inspector in Aurora. As of today, there is still no keyboard nudge support (Click on the value of a CSS rule and then press keyboard up / down keys to adjust it +1 / -1). Sticking with Firebug until this feature is added.