Comment by photon_off | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photon_off | Hacker News Reader

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I too have switched to Chrome about 5 months ago -- only because of its lower memory and CPU footprint (in my experience at least), and have found myself used to the Chrome web dev tools' assortment of annoyances. All things being equal, I'd prefer to use Firebug, but Firefox just eats up too much memory and starts to lock up for a few seconds at a time.

Some issues I've found with Chrome dev tools:

* console.log() is fundamentally broken [1]. There's a bug filed for it and it doesn't seem like it will be fixed.

* When you log an HTML element, there's no way to jump to it in the "Elements" view.

* If XHR response is in JSON, it does not show you it in friendly easy-to-navigate format, but rather a big string.

Aside from that both tools are really awesome and do pretty much everything I need them to.

[1]: http://techblog.appnexus.com/2011/webkit-chrome-safari-conso...

For 1) using breakpoints works very well to see current state of variables.

#3 is fixed (at least in the dev channel). There is a preview tab next to headers and response.

Dealing with breakpoints is a very time consuming process. In my opinion, a better workaround is to have a "log" function which wraps console.log(), and clones any objects if the browser is Chrome or Safari.

> For 1) using breakpoints works very well to see current state of variables.

That's a workaround for a completely broken behavior.

add to that list that the Chrome dev tools don't display errors in red in the network tab. A 200 next to a 404 is nearly to impossible to distinguish at first sight (basically, if you are looking at the name of the file, you are not looking at the response code at the same time.)

Every time I use the dev tools I find them lacking a lot of UI/UX details that Firebug had there forever.

Being unable to quickly switch between the CSS and Layout/Metrics view is another major downer. Tabs beat scrolling, always.

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