Hacker News Reader

Comment by roblabla | Hacker News Reader

While it's true the firefox debugger is lacking in certain areas, it's also better than chrome in others. Debugging CSS animations is much easier in firefox, but firefox lacks a way to look at websocket packets.

One thing I like about firefox is that its debugger is a just a React webapp : https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html. So it's fairly easy to add to it !

View on HN

There's also the grid layout debugger and a bunch of other stuff.

If you go to the devtools settings you can add a lot of cool tools to the main pane including a canvas debugger and some other useful stuff.

Think this is what Firefox should focus on, Chrome has had incredible resources put into making the devtools amazing, and they are amazing. If Firefox has a few killer features, it's not going to prevent people from using Chrome devtools, but they will Firefox as well, which is what everyone really wants, for the good of the web.

FWIW firefox has pretty steadily been churning out new debugger features this last year at least.

This is in the vein of firebug, the original "developer tools" extension, which was built in the same way: https://getfirebug.com/

I know the chrome dev tools are also just a web app themselves (or at least for the most part are).

I don't know the stack, but I do remember there is a way to open dev tools FOR the dev tools window.

> there is a way to open dev tools FOR the dev tools window

I did not know that.

Open DevTools > pop it out into a separate window > Ctrl+Shift+I (on Linux) > Ctrl+Shift+I ad infinitum > enjoy devtools-ception.

You can do the same in Firefox. It's under Tools -> Web Developer -> Browser Toolbox.

Okay, obvious question: are they portable enough that we could just wholesale import them into Firefox?

I'm honestly not sure. It would be cool to attempt that, but I have a feeling at least the chrome dev tools use internal/privileged APIs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com