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Comment by fuzzfactor | Hacker News Reader

I want my Stop button back.

It was good when you could instantly stop all incoming data from a website with a single click.

And you had a status bar at the bottom of your browser that displayed the source address of each piece of data as it was coming in.

You could always refresh later if you thought you were missing something.

So much garbage is now unstoppable.

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On a desktop browser, I pound the Escape key repeatedly to stop the loading. Many a times it works. But some sites have sneaky JavaScript loaded quite early and that starts doing some nasty stuff.

SeaMonkey has this in the status bar! There's a little power plug icon you can click to go offline/online. It will even still happily load pages from cache while offline (so I can click from this page back to the HN front page and onto articles I've clicked on or comments I've viewed before, and it just loads them as you'd expect). If you click on a link it doesn't have cached, it'll pop up an error screen and prompt you to go back online.

Safari still has a stop button. I still use it on a semi-regular basis.

same.

for a while i feel like chrome developer console had the ability to pause (and step thru) js.

i don't see that button anymore... am i crazy? did that ever exist?

You still can. I did it just now with this text field form. Hit pause, and then the next event (focusing the text field) caused it to break.

yes you can step though and set break points, don't ask me how tho, I've not used it seriously enough to remember.

You could attempt to read google documentation and spend hours not learning how to do something.

it's undermined by `debugger` statements these days designed to make it difficult to inspect page content

How does that work? I'm not familiar.

If you try to inspect the page, the code will run up to the next debugger statement, where one was purposefully inserted near the top of the code. If you try to continue past it, it just loops back onto the debugger statement.

If you load the page normally without inspecting it, these debugger statements are ignored.

Not seen that one before, but a smart trick.

"The debugger statement invokes any available debugging functionality, such as setting a breakpoint. If no debugging functionality is available, this statement has no effect."

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