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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Waiting to switch back from chrome to firefox after all this "Google dropping <product>" stuff. But the Chrome dev-tools are simply amazing, Firebug always felt clunky to me.

So I'm looking forward to this update :)

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(Chrome devotee here). I spend an hour recently with FF-22 trying to debug a regression in FF by using the built-in dev tools; it seems to lack the ONLY feature that I actually want (and to be honest I feel so bemused that it's not there that I think I'm being dumb and missed it): I can't execute a JS statement in the context of the current stack frame. I'm sure the scratchpad must be able to do this, because otherwise it seems like its the most useless debugging console I've seen in some time.

I had the same experience. Fortunately, FF23 adds this feature (under the heading 'Web Console in Debugger Frame' in the linked post).

That feature means you can set a breakpoint in any javascript and while you are paused on a frame you can execute JS in the web console. The code you type executes in the stackframe you have selected in the debugger.

(this did not work in ff22 or older)

Nightly does that now.

We will add a way to select the iframe/frame where to execute JS. This feature is currently in planning.

Considering that chromium is an opensource project and has many contributors... if Google ever did drop Chrome it's not it'll just collect dust.

True story.

But FFox has made major progress the last few years :)

And I would like the give Google a good reason to continuing their support of Mozilla: a userbase.

At the risk of making a facetious comment, surely support for web standards is de facto support for Mozilla? Or do you mean monetary support?

Monetary

The problem with a modern web browser project is it's expensive to operate. All the ones I know of have extensive regression test suites, both correctness and performance, that get run from continuous integration systems in multiple configurations and on multiple platforms. That's not to mention the continuous fuzz testing farms looking for security bugs.

I'm most familiar with the Firefox case: according to https://etherpad.mozilla.org/InfraLoadIdeas a full correctness test run across all platforms is about 120 hours of machine time. Adding performance tests raises that to 177 hours. Combined with the pace of development, that means a build+test farm of 3000+ machines (according to http://oduinn.com/blog/2013/03/27/at-mozilla-releaseengineer... ) and infrastructure load is still a problem.

So any serious project picking up Chromium development would need financial resources to at the very least maintain basic test infrastructure...

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