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Comment by tdumitrescu | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the browser has gotten snappier. But then I pop open the dev tools and they're unbearably slow - like I simply can't do real dev work in FF anymore, have to use Chrome. It may be that I tend to do a lot of development with Web Components, which FF still doesn't have natively (though Custom Elements are live in 59/nightly, right?!), but either way it seems like a failing of the tooling that it beachballs for 5-10s at a time when inspecting normal valid html.

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This is strange. FF dev tools are a lot quicker for our apps then the Chrome dev tools. In fact, the Chrome dev tools are snail speed compared to the FF ones. Again, this might be related to the type of app you are developing.

Try this: From the "Inspector" tab, click on any CSS file in order to open the Style Editor. Loading the file and then scrolling to the relevant part is much slower than Chrome if you do this on a page with several stylesheets.

Yep, true that.

The browser itself is very snappy an enjoyable now (apart from high res videos, which drive up CPU load a lot).

But the devtools are unbearably slow. They hog down performance to a crawl.

I use FF as my main browser now, but when I need to do some web debugging I switch over to chrome.

Have you tried the developer edition? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

The "break on exception" button is missing in that one.

> But then I pop open the dev tools and they're unbearably slow - like I simply can't do real dev work in FF anymore, have to use Chrome.

I've had to sit patiently waiting for sourcemaps to load or finally hit breakpoints in FF, I usually try to test changes in Chrome and hope that they work well in FF. Minor inspector usage for CSS styling and what not.

(It's still my primary browser at work, though.)

I experienced the same trying to switch recently. The devtools are the only blocker from me switching to firefox - they're much worse than they used to be performance-wise

same here. Am considering switching over to firefox for main browsing, but development is def in chrome for now. Last time I checked FF console warnings still brought me to the compiled JS file instead of the actual source file through sourcemaps. Did that change yet? (very limited internet atm so cant check)

This! If I have at least one tab with Dev Tools open, then FF becomes unbearably slow. Will check if it is fixed in FF58 though.

When FF 57 came out I was surprised at the new debugger, much better than the old one. But turns out it's still useless. I can't put a breakpoint in the middle of a WebGL game and expect it to work like in Chrome.

The last dev version is even more useless, the "break on exception" button is missing.

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