Designing Tools
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Just any property that has a preset number of values show up as options as you type. The difference is that Chrome shows a dropdown list while with Firefox you have to sort of remember the values as it does an autocomplete. I see no reason Firefox couldn't offer the dropdown since it clearly knows the possible values.
By the way, I tried the same font thing in Chrome and it responded the same way, no font list. You can see a similar behavior with color, for the value it shows possible colors by name. Start your color with # and suddenly there's no options. If there are too many possibilities to list it doesn't list anything.
Personally, I think that console could do some work. Chrome console is top notch, and there is too much noise in FF version, with CSS and other stuff.
EDIT: Another thing, there needs to be a font shape difference between input and output. Basically, you should be able to tell if something is input or output without looking into the arrows to the side.
What language are you guys writing Dev Tools? I'd love to be able to help out, but I'm not too great with C++?
- Working on the console is a nice REPL experience with code completion and data structure navigation, almost similar to a Smalltalk/Lisp workspace
- I can work on the console whenever I feel like it and do not have to pause the debugger
- More freedom to place breakpoints in the whole browser stack (events, html changes, ajax calls, ...)
- Code and event profiling
- Reformatting minified JavaScript
- Tooling for navigation the whole set of resources and local databases being used by the browser
Other than that I really like the tools.
...a common technique. Chrome DevTools supports this, and both Facebook and Google use it in their XHR/AJAX responses (so do I).
(Next time I should do better and file it myself)
The two little things that annoyed me most:
When inspecting an element, the element is per default collapsed (i.e. it's children are not shown). Often, I want to see the children as well - one more unnecessary click. This may be a good design decision if the tools are running on a laptop screen inside the main browser window, but I'm using two monitors and the tools take a whole screen.
Related, my main monitor has a terrible (=no) contrast between white and light gray if viewed from some angles. Often, if I inspect an element, I'm missing the highlight (light gray on white)... Yep, I should probably play with the monitor settings, although FF seems to be the only tool I have this problem with.
These are obviously not big issues and I don't miss the Chrome tools too much, so I'm sticking with FF. Keep up the good work!
Firefox offers a dark theme in the inspector's settings, maybe try that. I personally don't like it though.
I haven't done any side-by-side testing of Chrome and FF (and am currently not working), so I can't reproduce the issue now.
- no call stack(?)
- breakpoints are a bit of a hit or miss, especially when callbacks are involved.
- http request monitoring is a bit messy - you see the request in the console, you can click on them, but the resulting dialog box only offers basic info, without even an option to go to the clicked url directly. In network panel the functionality is completely different for some reason. Fortunately mostly fine, but one irritating thing is that response view is so little and you cannot make it much wider.
But anyway, they're improving greatly, only a couple of months back you couldn't even think about not using Firebug in FF. So kudos to them for all the hard work.
There are breadcrumbs across the debugger's toolbar for quick always available access, or there is a tab to display the whole stack at once next to the sources tab on the left sidebar.
breakpoints are a bit of a hit or miss, especially when callbacks are involved.
If you have a test case / url / steps to reproduce, please file a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...
We can't fix what we can't detect.
So kudos to them for all the hard work.
Thanks :)
To those who are color blind, how do you overcome color blind in software? Do you guys have software to help changing color on your computer? Should and will Firefox address that kind of problem?
Nightly defaults to the dark theme. I like old white theme. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=947242 why do we choose the dark theme over the white theme? I am not color blind but I use computer typically between 12-18 hours. Who made that decision? Can we make the white theme default again? I honestly don't think the dark theme helps reading. If anything, the dark theme hurts me viewing.
Also, (warning this gets a little hand wavy) most pages on the web are light, so the light theme blends in. It is useful to have that contrast by default. Easier to make a distinction visually, and also "self xss" is deterred a little because the devtools are more obviously not part of facebook or whatever.
Secondly, once you switch to the light theme (available in the options pane of nightly) it should persist for you, so it will become your "default".
I don't use software to change color on my computer--there's nothing that I can change it to that will look more like whatever y'all see it as--I just simply can't see that color. I've lived with my colorblindness for three decades, so it's not like I'm trying to get used to it still. Sometimes the contrast is off on things, and I'll try to correct it manually, but there's nothing that I can do to make me see a color that's physically impossible for me to discern.
I rely on hex codes a lot, and I do my best to develop UIs that I can navigate with ease, and won't hurt others that are colorblind. For example, whenever I see red (255,0,0) text on blue (0,0,255), or vice versa, it physically hurts my eyes.
Really the only thing that reminds me I'm colorblindness day-to-day is folding laundry. My wife color-coordinates her clothes in her closet, so when I hang them up, it's a crap shoot. She often comes to me with a new article of clothing and says, "So I can find this later, what color do you think this is?" I'm usually wrong. C'est la vie.
> In response to this, Mozilla has designed a way to lock the device and offer guest access to apps predefined by the user with a green light to allow anyone to use them. All other apps will remain behind a password protected wall until the primary user changes the settings.
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240215078/Mozilla-launch...
This is actually an idea I also came up with after the whole Miranda thing at the UK airport and finding out that the UK authorities can arrest you just for not revealing your devices' passwords, which I think is just insane, especially if you're just passing through UK. I don't know what the UK people are thinking, but they can't let anymore days pass by without repealing this awful law.
But I think I had a slightly better idea for this. Don't just make it obvious that there is another account on the phone. That doesn't improve things too much. Completely hide the accounts, and when you're asked for a password, it should open up the account according to the password you're using.
So if you pass through the UK airport, and they get your phone, and they get prompted for a password, you can just tell them the password to your "safe" account, and they would be none the wiser. That's what I've been hoping Google will implement for Android, but it would be nice if Mozilla did it to push this idea out there.
The second thing I wanted to say here, and also something I've been thinking about for even longer, but perhaps now is the perfect time to do it - Mozilla should create a Firefox to Firefox (or to Chrome extension) end-to-end encrypted chat app. This could all of the sudden bring true communications privacy to over 300 million people at once. It would be amazing!
The reason I say it's the perfect time to do it now, is because Open WhisperSystems has already done most of the work on creating a very secure asynchronous protocol that even works with groups, and they've said they're already working on a browser solution, anyway.
I'm sure they'll create a Firefox extension either way, but if you could work with them on this, help them out with the funds they dearly need, and then put the app front of center on Firefox as an integrated part of Firefox (you could even promote it as a secure communication solution to enterprise users), that would be fantastic.
The problem with end-to-end encryption right now is that it's barely seeing any support from small fundless groups, and none of the large platform owners seem to have any interest in deploying it. Mozilla is one such large platform owner, it's also an open source organization, and they seem to be working on improving their users' privacy. So I couldn't think of a better large platform to do this first.