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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Firebug was the greatest thing to happen to web development. Honestly I still prefer it to the native dev tools. I especially love how most things go to the console so I don't have to jump all over the place to find the information I'm looking for. I absolutely abhor the network panel in Chrome. It's like they're purposefully trying to make it difficult.

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I noticed in recent firefox-dev you can now expand XHR requests directly in the console which then pops up a mini network panel.

I don't know how long it's been there, I noticed it today but I might have simply had XHR logging off previously.

I just noticed that this week as well, although like you I have no idea how long it's been there. Pretty nifty little feature.

It's been here for a long time, but by default the console has several filters disabling some output, including XHR. So most people don't know about it.

> I absolutely abhor the network panel in Chrome.

What do you mean? There are plenty of ways to filter down the activity tab in Chrome if the problem you're experiencing is that the volume of requests is too high to be useful.

I am more at home in FF so this might not be true for Chrome... Just look at the simplicity and elegance of Firebug net panel (https://2r4s9p1yi1fa2jd7j43zph8r-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/fil...). I love Mozilla and respect them immensely, but any change they made to Firebug was for the worse. If they just copied the functionalities and design the result would be much better. I am very sorry I had to stop using Firebug. RIP!

Why would they make their own. I wish they took over firebug.

You can get a similar view in Chrome by turning off the filter button and the two view buttons in the network toolbar, then ctrl-click on any of the columns in the table to hide the ones you aren't interested in.

Yeaaaah... not a Chrome-phone-home fan, so I'll make do with what FF has to offer. But thanks for the suggestion, hope it helps someone else. :)

Then why not use Chromium? You get the same development experience with less Google.

If I were to guess, it's probably the same reason I don't like/use Chrone Dev tools, it seems overwhelmingly noisy with options/information I neither need or care about. Firebug was basically the opposite of that.

I just don't trust the devs behind Chromium (who are mostly employed by Google) to care about their users' privacy. Using FF is my way of voting against that.

Too simplistic. I find that view to be severely lacking in any useful insight

It is interesting that Network Panel in Firefox has built-in simple Postman-like tool [1] for editing request which you have already made.

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/hBkmq

// Chrome has copy as curl command.

// firefox has copy as curl too, fwiw

but yeah, the edit-and-resend tool is amazing

You should log out and back in if you haven't already. That screenshot contains almost your entire session token.

Yeah, I know. I made that screenshot, signed out, uploaded this file, then logged in to post my previous comment. Thank you for reminding anyway :)

Great for cheating at Facebook messenger games. Just send whatever score you like!

One would assume that the remote end doesn't trust user input...apparently not.

I can assure you - you're not the only one who hates Network Panel.

It's definitely one of the weakest parts of the Firefox dev tools suite. I quite like Chrome's network panel though.

I consider Firefox's Network panel more useful than Chrome's. Having the ability to edit and resend network requests out of the box is exceptionally handy.

On the other hand, having it always be a 2 step process kinda stinks. I haven't yet seen a way to just say "replay this request". The editing is nice, but I almost always have to just replay, quickly, and I can't do that in FF, but can in Chrome. Might be 20% of the time the 'edit and resend' is a handy/useful functionality - 'replay xhr' is handy the other 80% of the time.

Copy the whole thing as curl, then go to postman and import the raw text of the curl command... Edit and replay all you want

The firebug theme in firefox dev tools has eased the pain somewhat for me.

Thanks for mentioning it! I still miss the Firebug, it just made more sense to me. For anyone searching for info how to enable the theme: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Settings

That helped a lot

That theme is so ugly. It's like Firebug is permanently stuck in Windows XP.

It really was. I actually quit web development a few months before I learnt about Firebug because Internet Explorer was causing me loss of sleep (seriously). When I discovered Firebug I almost wanted to start doing it again, but then I quickly reminded myself that it wouldn't help with IE6 retardation.

I was really surprised to see an inferior clone appear in Chrome. I then started to hear people talking about Chrome dev tools and would always ask, "did you not know about Firebug?", and the answer would be no. Strange.

huh? How can one love firebug over Chrome Dev Tools? With the latter being just as revolutionary as firebug was when it first came out.

Revolutionary in what way? What could you do in Chrome Dev Tools when it first came out that you couldn't do in Firebug at the same time?

I think revolutionary as how Apple defines the word. They weren't the first but they sure had the panels running the smoothest.

Boy, I missed the time when we used "revolutionary" for, you know, revolutionary things.

That makes no sense, GP stated the chrome devtools were just as revolutionary as firebug was when it first came out. Not just "meaninglessly revolutionary" but more revolutionary than the one tool at the origin of all modern web devtools.

I don't remember precisely the feature set of Chrome devtools in intial version. I should have clarified. The current iteration of Chrome Devtools compared to firebug represents a revolution in web debugging capability

Wasn't the initial version of the Chrome dev tools just the exact same as the Apple WebKit/Safari dev tools until Google started fleshing them out? Or am I misremembering history?

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