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Comment by catlifeonmars | Hacker News Reader

FWIW if you ship source maps, then you can have the best of both worlds.

Do those work in View Source? Don't you have to load the site and inspect it in a debugger for source maps to kick in, which doesn't happen in the noscript scenario?

I don't think view source will load source maps but you can still open the f12 debugger and load source maps (even automatically) with noscript enabled. The debugger isn't treated as a normal webpage, rather part of the browser itself.

It's mostly just kind of funny that "View Source" diverged so much from the F12 debugger. For most of its history Spartan Edge had caught and fixed that mistake and View Source just dropped you into the F12 debugger. It's almost sad that Chromium Edge again shows you a different unrelated view.

Firefox has also seemed to wander back and forth between View Source just reuses the full Dev Tools and View Source is a disconnected view from Dev Tools for whatever reason. At the moment the big difference flag seems to be if you install/use Firefox Developer or not.

(Allegedly, one of the reasons is that some non-technical users have strange reasons that they View Source from time to time and they get upset if it opens Dev Tools because Dev Tools is just too confusing. Mac Safari has that interesting dance to ask it to opt in to showing Dev Tools. I seem to recall IE11 did something similar that if you ever opened Dev Tools for more than a few minutes it then took over for View Source, but otherwise used the older and simpler View Source from ancient IE history. I'm surprised that if the reason is "it confuses non-technical reasons" there isn't an opt-in flag in Chrome or Chromium Edge. The "Firefox Developer Edition" is a separate SKU is also an interesting way to approach that.)

But there aren’t any guarantees that the file the source map points to is actually the source, right?

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