Firefox Debugger

Conditional breakpoints have been around for years, which solve all of those via arbitrary javascript. You just make the condition falsey if you don't want it to break (or `doAnything() && false`). Skip-counters are just a global counter and `x++ > N`. "Probe Expression" does look pretty neat though, that'd be a bit of a pain to do by hand (probably just viewing logs, which does provide rich objects in recent-ish years).

Granted, the UI isn't as clear about the capabilities, but I generally prefer "run JS, return true" over "choose one of N kinds of things to do", even if one of the N is "run JS, return true". Minus skip counters, those are a bit annoying by hand (needing globally unique var names and all).

I'm not sure when Firefox's built-in debugger got it, but I see search results implying they've been part of FireBug since 2007 at the very least. And I don't remember Chrome's debugger ever not having it (once they got their current-gen-like one, iirc it launched with extremely limited devtools?), though I could easily be forgetting the early days.

You can at least both "Log Message" and "Evaluate" in Chrome with conditional break points. Calling console.log is falsy, so calling it from conditional break points just causes it to log the message (you also have access to any variables in scope of the breakpoint that you can use to build the message). You can do the same thing with executing random JavaScript. Just put the statement and add && false to make sure it always returns false.

As a Lisper, tracing is something I also often miss on other platforms. It's really powerful, particularly when debugging "functionnal" code.

I get your point but a non-breaking breakpoint sounds like a contradiction. Maybe it should be called a tracepoint?

DevEdition is our fourth release channel, along with Stable, Beta, and Nightly builds. The engine is generally based on Beta, but we can ship features to DevEdition separately from mainline Firefox. For example, we can ship new developer tools to that channel before they land in Beta, it runs in its own separate profile by default, we allow Developer Edition to disable the add-on signing requirement, etc.

If you're a developer, use the developer edition, it's amazing. I'm too lazy to give you a feature-by-feature breakdown of what hasn't hit stable yet but... up until just recently "quantum" was one of them.

The news about FF getting faster is just hitting the mainstream now but developer edition has had it for months, and I haven't suffered any noticeable bleeding edge issues (mostly because I'm not on nightly). This might have to do with my update cadence with arch (firefox-developer is in the AUR) but I think more likely it's the distance from nightly.

Anecdotally I find it to be just the blind amount of "bleeding edge" (others described it well, behind nightly but ahead of stable), and I am now lost whenever I try to debug anything in chrome.

The developer edition is bit more bleeding edge than beta, but less than nightly. Nightly is updated daily. I'm not sure what the developer frequency is. But if your sporting it, you're getting the fresh features not entirely ready.

dark theme... and maybe more

I have a similar thing but with profiling JS performance: if you profile a page in Chrome and then inspect the source code, it gives estimates of seconds spent per line of code. Firefox does not have this.

Being able to detect which function is the bottleneck is great, but being able to then figure out where the time is spent inside that function can be very enlightening too.

That‘s being worked on in Q1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15695910

This is also a big barrier for me using firefox in development, and pre-v57 Firefox used to have an extension for websockets that was nice, but its gone now with the new web extension APIs.

> Sad to see a post by Mozilla only referencing Mac and Windows shortcuts to start the debugger. Most of the web developers I know are using Linux ...

Maybe because the shortcuts will be (slightly) different across the various Linux desktops (desktop environments and Linux distributions). There is not one Linux desktop like there's one macOS or one Windows.

There are only minor differences between the Windows and Linux shortcuts. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf... for a full list.

Are there any shortcuts on Linux which are different from those on Windows by default?

I don't know any Web developers using Linux on their desktops, as company policy requires Windows desktops.

Linux is only used for Java based backends, when deploying into production.

With .NET deployments being done on IIS, even with .NET Core.

Some of the designers are using Photoshop on macOS.

Anecdote data.

Set about:config?filter=devtools.debugger.new-debugger-frontend to false, then reopen the debugger and expand the right pane, the Events tab should be there: https://i.imgur.com/GLGrc7y.png.

There is, the dark one is just the default for Developer Edition. In fact, regular Firefox comes with a light scheme by default.

yes there is a light theme and a "firebug" theme

Click the cog icon, top-right for DevTools options. Available themes are Dark, Light, Firebug.

It's similar if you look skin deep. Differences emerge once you start using it on daily basis.

The coolest thing FF has over Chrome is the little [ev] icon next to an element that shows what events are connected to it. Saves me lots of time trying to track things down.

The coolest thing Chrome has over FF is that stepping through code is so much faster. There is no lag at all, while there is one in FF. It also has a "Search All" mode where it will look through all your code (html, js, css) to find a string.

Extremely similar.

It's there. Storage > Cookies. If you don't see a storage tab, you may need to turn it in the DevTools settings.