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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

OK so now I'm considering switching my primary work browser to Safari instead of Chrome (I use Firefox for a lot of my general/personal browsing already). The one thing holding me back is development tools. Which has better devtools, Firefox or Safari? (I've tried both several times but always ended up running back to Chrome...)

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>Which has better devtools, Firefox or Safari?

Firefox for sure. You can install dev tools extensions (like https://github.com/vuejs/vue-devtools) + Fx has more features to begin with

Not to mention Firefox Developer Edition in general: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

I don't have an answer to your question, but I would ask: Why not use what you find best for development tools?

Ie, I've switched away from almost everything Google. My phones, my email, my life. Yet, I still have Chrome installed. It has useful features, like development tools, Hangouts (for random free calls), etc.

Is it worth it to purge Chrome entirely? Are we worried about Google as if they're a virus? I'm asking honestly, do we need to be concerned with even having Chrome installed? If not, then I'd argue to keep it installed and use it for the features you need from it, like dev tools. The majority of your traffic will still be on Safari or Firefox, right?

Chrome and other Google softwares, by default will install a system-wide auto updater (Google Keystone[1]) set to run every 5 hours. The Keystone Agent cannot easily be removed, and will reinstall itself on every updates. There has also been an exploit[2] of this auto updater service.

If what you need is Chrome developer's tools, installing Chromium (or building your own, for the paranoid) seems like a much better choice to me.

[1]: Note that it has nothing to do with the google/keystone project on GitHub

[2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=14...

Is the Keystone Agent run by cron? Modifying crontab is just a few keystrokes.

Keystone Agent is running by launchd on macOS, usually modifying defaults can stop it from running:

    defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0

However, this won't remove the agent from the system, and I think there's no way to be sure Google won't change this configuration key in an update (or even overriding its value).

What happens if you chmod the plist for the launch agent to 000?

I have never tried, but presumably launchd won't run the Keystone agent (although using defaults command can archive the same, if we were to just disable it from running).

The issue is when we want to keep Chrome and maybe other Google apps installed, while _not_ have Keystone, and not letting any Google software reinstall Keystone. In that case, it involve uninstalling Keystone agent, creating GoogleSoftwareUpdate directory then chmod that directory to 000 both in ~/Library/Google and /Library/Google

Is there a component to Keystone I'm missing aside from the agent? Because if launchd can't run it, presumably Keystone wouldn't work.

I believe Chrome itself do invoke Keystone when visiting chrome://chrome to manually check for updates, as it looks like from a forum post[1] (Chrome unable to check for updates after chmod 000'ing GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent)

[1]: https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/14162/google-ch...

Safari is my daily driver, but for Dev work I switched to FireFox because almost 100% of Devs I know just use Chrome for both dev and everything, which is a good way to miss things breaking elsewhere and falling into an IE-like monoculture.

This. I keep Chrome only to test and sometimes use their dev tools though I am also productive with the ones from Firefox. They both have different things to offer.

having chrome installed is pretty bad even if you don't use it, because google has binaries running at all times on you computer if you do.

I personally use Firefox dev tools about 99% of the time. I prefer it to Chrome. It's different from Chrome, but the performance and features are comparable, if not better.

I found using Firefox console and debugger so frustrating that I had to switch back to chrome

I use Firefox AND Chrome for work. Chrome for development with the dev tools (I don't really mind if Chrome is phoning home to google with URLs like `localhost:8080`, and my local dev sites certainly aren't setting tracking cookies.

I use Firefox with the new Container Tabs feature for everything else (email, JIRA, etc), which is particularly nice as you can have multiple accounts from the same SAAS site open in the same window.

Firefox easily. They're not as good as Chrome's, but Safari's lag behind.

I think Safari dev tools are great; however, I am not heavy into JavaScript, so I can’t comment on those specifics. I think it’s a full-featured as the others for the most part. There hasn’t been anything I’ve needed that Safari doesn’t provide.

I really wish I could use FF for dev, but until they add a "resend XHR" option (vs/ their "Edit and Resend"), it's unusable. I need immediate "resend" and never, ever, edit.

Second deal-breaker with FF is the bug whereby you cannot edit/resend XHR at all with filters enabled: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1432724

Without filters, the list in the "Network" panel is next to useless.

I'd highly recommend running the Firefox 63 beta, they've (finally) fixed some longstanding macOS performance issues and it feels significantly faster than previous releases.

I'm not sure about Safari, but the last time I evaluated Firefox(the initial Quantum release), it lacked the ability to inspect websocket frames. Was a dealbreaker for me and I had to go back to Chrome.

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