Hacker News Reader

Comment by etherealG | Hacker News Reader

I find the developer tools in chrome actually better than firebug these days. Do you have any specific features that you miss with the current builds of both?

View on HN

I find they are all lacking in major ways and I have to jump between IE, FireFox, and Chrome. Anyone that swears by a single browser's dev tools isn't making much use of them.

  - Only Chrome lets you set a breakpoint on JS event listeners.
  - Only IE let's you change the next line of execution in JS.
  - You *can't* edit the value of a local variable in the Chrome console!
  - Only IE9 & FF search multiple JS files when doing a text find.
  - IE doesn't refresh the dev tools representation of the DOM without clicking refresh.
  - Only IE has a "format JavaScript" for minimized, obfuscated JS.  And it allows you to set breakpoints on the formatted lines!
  - Only Chrome has tools for finding memory leaks (see dev channel for big improvements in that).

Etc, etc.

Minor quibble. The latest versions of chrome(12 onwards) let you de-obfuscate JS code, and set breakpoints in the cleaned up code. Just right click in the source tab pane, and the code get prettified.

Only IE (so far) has lied horribly to me in its debugger: http://cl.ly/012t192A2s3Y1A3b3j3H . How in the world does that happen? For the record, `FireEvent` doesn't exist, but `fireEvent` does.

And then there's the worthless "{...}" object display from the Javascript console...

The horrible "{...}" output for almost everything (and proper callstacks when using named function expressions) are all fixed in IE9. That still puts it dead last for MOST visualizations behind all the other browsers OTHER than IE8, but some things, such as the profiler call tree, are still the best.

I suppose it's mostly layout/look&feel. I actually didn't realize how powerful the built in Chrome developer tools were. Little things, like showing the color or image when you mouse over the hex or link are what make Firebug nicer to use, I think. Is there a way to persist the network tab or console across page loads in Chrome?

yep, they have a persistence button like firebug these days. on the network panel it's the black circle, and the console seems to have it in a settings panel (although I'm on a dev build, I think it's also a button on release build.

agreed about the little things like hovers. I still find that double clicks on image resources in css not opening them in a new tab drives me mad :)

I do love chromes timings panel, with rendering timings. much better for optimizing. and their whole dev tools seem to run a lot quicker for me, firebug I have speed issues with sometimes, especially on complicated js pages.

Have you tried YSlow for Firebug?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com