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Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

How are the Firefox dev tools these days? Every time I've tried in the past I end up missing the Chrome dev tools, and it's too much of a pain to have one browser for development and one for browsing. I would love to switch, though.

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I actually have the exact opposite experience when I try out Chromium based browsers. I end up missing FF dev tools. I love the ability to edit and resend network requests. I'm sure I could figure out how do to so in Chrome devtools, but just not as intuitive (at least to me!)

For me it depends on what I'm doing. I too like the edit and resend ability in firefox dev tools but what I've found it lacking is the option to automatically open dev tools for pop ups, which is possible in chrome.

There is a beginning of solution for popups in Firefox DevTools.

You can toggle `devtools.popups.debug` preference [1] to true in about:config and DevTools should open on popups.

Unfortunately, there is some limitations, highlighted at the end of that bugzilla entry. It won't work for <a target="_blank">, while it should work for window.open usages.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1569859

I'm the same. I can't stand Chrome's dev tools.

I can do everything in terms of debugging in firefox than I can in chrome. I've not found any issues thus far, including wrangling cookies and more esoteric auth stuff. Obviosuly every good webdev does multiple browser testing and sometimes firefox behaves differently to chrome so you have to jump in and see why. Never been an issue (to my work at least).

> and it's too much of a pain to have one browser for development and one for browsing.

Why? I am surprised as I use 3 browsers for different contexts: - ungoogled chromium for everything behind my company's SSO - firefox with an AWS theme with containers setup for each AWS account under another firefox account. - librewolf for everything else with containers syncronized under a personal firefox account

I could probably run everything under the same firefox or librewolf browser and different profiles but that way I didn't even had to setup separate launchers for the profiles. I also like that they are all visually different so I can spot them easily when switching windows.

I haven't used Firefox in a bit, but I thought their devtools were pretty good, but last time I used it I used their developer edition browser [1]. I think the devtools were particularly bad when you used to have to install Firebug as a seperate part of the browser which is no longer the case [2]. For a quick view of what the developer tools currently look like you can see here [3]

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

[2]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefo...

[3]: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/

Depends on what you are used to. Since FF is my main, I try to use it for my pet projects. However, I always start a Chrome instance after several minutes because of two extremely jarring behaviors:

1. "Pause breakpoints" gets unchecked after app rebuilds and/or restarts.

2. The Ctrl+P hotkey only works on the sources tab, unlike Chrome. I just can't bear to always keep in mind what tab I'm on when using a hotkey.

Note that the "Pause breakpoints" [1] should be fixed in the next release, Firefox 135, which should ship on February 4.

Regarding Ctrl+P, there is a bug on file [2], we could easily make it so that it switches to debugger and open that search-for-file UI from there. Showing this UI on top of any panel would be a much more involved change.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1933764 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409544

Wow, I didn't expect such a precise reply! Thank you.

I'd say the Chrome devtools are a tiny bit better, usually with more features or a bit better UX. But there are also things where I find Firefox devtools better. And the features missing are not a deal breaker for me.

Overall it's a pretty similar experience. Most difficult part is the habit changing of getting used to a different UI.

Dev tools are very decent. At this point it's almost indistinguishable from Chrome dev tools. The "Performance" tab might be the one exception, where it's a different flow for profiling. But otherwise it should feel very familiar.

Mostly on par with Chrome, at least for basic (95%) usage. Although for some cases I switch to Chromium.

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