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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

I really really love Firefox as my personal browser, but I always find myself using Chrome to develop/debug my applications because it's dev tools outclasses those in Firefox.

I've tried the dev edition and firebug and neither comes close - the console is particularly bad. Sometimes expressions randomly don't show the evaluated results, stack traces don't use codemaps and the whole design makes me think of the python IDLE debugger. I've also spent ~2 days in total tracking down a reverse heisenbug, one that only appeared when the dev tools were open. Maddening.

I eagerly check the release notes each time for some improvements, but I'm still waiting :(

Edit: To be fair they do seem to add interesting developer features, but on the day-to-day usability front it's still pretty dire.

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I have almost the opposite, I use chrome for browsing but find FF's dev tools a lot more intuitive. Different mindsets I guess, and while I do find that some FF debugging features are confusing (the difference between the console, the scratchpad and the GCLI is just an annoying distinction), overall I find FF has better console highlighting and is easier to browse objects because it'll expand a logged object to a sidebar on click, but in chrome it stays in that console.

There is a separate issue where Firefox can have much worse performance when the developer tools are open. This is something has been slowly being addressed but I think there's still a lot of work to get it to chrome levels.

> overall I find FF has better console highlighting and is easier to browse objects because it'll expand a logged object to a sidebar on click

I do actually like that feature, but in my experience the console is a lot less intuitive than the one in Chrome. I've pasted the output from running "$('a')" on github.com here[1] using both Chrome and Firefox. Firefox gives you a massive chunk of output that can't be minimized, while Chrome gives you a condensed output that you can actually navigate through (with pagination). It's annoying that outputting a large-ish object instantly destroys the log with way too much output.

Stack traces are another annoyance, in Chrome I get a trace that I can minimize and maximize, with all the line numbers resolved using sourcemaps and with hyperlinks to the debugger. My experience with Firefox has been an unresolved giant minimized stacktrace that is really no fun to look at. The debugger also often just takes me to my concatenated 100000 line app.js file rather than using the sourcemaps.

I guess it does come down to different mindsets, I've been playing with Firebug while writing this and it seems a lot better than I remember. I've also found this[2] post about them integrating Firebug into FF itself, so good things are on the horizon :)

1. http://paste.pound-python.org/show/lUuq1bnMzOnSbcl5bhvC/

2. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/10/firebug-devtools-integrati...

On the github.com home page, $('a') gives me the following in Firefox, with a nice attribute navigator panel:

Object { length: 33, prevObject: Object, context: HTMLDocument → github.com, selector: "a", 33 more… }

Chrome just spews a screenful of HTML to the console.

Another thing is that Firefox actually has a $ operator built in now, which is useful when the page does not even load jquery. (Chrome might have that as well?)

Interesting. Just a counterpoint: I also use FF as my main browser, but I have the happy circumstancing of far preferring to debug with FF than Chrome. Not sure when I last used Chrome, actually.

Firefox's design dev tools are waaaay better. CSS, animations, etc. For JavaScript it's better for Chrome in some ways and better for Firefox in others. I end up using both kind of randomly for dev even though I'm 100% Firefox for normal browsing.

I typically debug with chrome, but the if I want to hunt down an event attached to an element I pull out fire fox dev.

It really seems great for developing I personally just have too much inertia to switch.

What are your specific problems with it?

If you are asking me, it's probably mostly inertia as well. My workflow is easier in FF, and I know where things are. I used to use Firebug exclusively, but it got buggy and I started with the web dev stuff with FF.

When I want to check the responsive stuff I use Chrome.

For responsive view, use ctrl-shift-m in Firefox. (Cmd-opt-m on Mac)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Responsive_De...

I also prefer to debug on Chrome rather than Firefox. I'd use Firefox with Firebug whenever weird stuff would happen in the Chrome tools console, like error messages getting cut off and things like that, but it's been months since that's happened.

I debug network related stuff a lot, and in FireFox after a while the browser performance starts to degrade, while in Chrome the performance is still manageable.

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