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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to guess that Chrome DevTools is going to fall behind Firefox by end of this year.

Today it's not possible for me to make the switch. There are some features that Firefox devtools is lacking from DevTools.

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That seems to be premature. Depends what you consider a DevTool. Chrome still has far better profiling/tracing tools for performance analysis. The latest Chrome versions even let you hover over functions and view what the V8 JIT thought of them (e.g. deoptimized and why). Even relatively low hanging fruit, like debugging WebWorkers is missing from FF. I see tons of missing stuff that Chrome DevTools has that FF is missing. It doesn't have something like the Timeline tab for tracking memory/framerate over time. I don't see stuff like HTML5 FileSystem/IndexDB/localStorage browsing. SourceMap support doesn't match Chrome. Etc.

FF seems to do better with the DOM/Designer portion of tooling, but from a JS-heavy coder perspective it seems behind.

Like we aren't working on all those things ;)

Sometimes I wonder if Chrome and Mozilla could standardize on some DevTool APIs, like JVMs standardized on JVMTI/JPDA, so that a portion of the code could be shared and people could build JS dev-tooling that would work with either browser.

Obviously, there's lots of stuff that is tied to internals, especially when it comes to profiling and native code bindings, but it seems like something could be done.

A good start would be for JS VMs to adopt a standard debugger protocol so that attaching a tool to the JS debugger would be browser independent.

As a GWT maintainer I would be overjoyed if Firefox would simply match Chrome as a solid, fast JavaScript debugger that supports sourcemaps well for large apps. The announced bells and whistles aren't going to help my users if they can't even debug their code.

Here are some features I'm missing:

    Break on attribute or subtree modification
    HTML Node drag and drop (yup! Chrome DevTools have it)
    XPath (I use it for testing)
    FPS monitor and force repaint

Thanks for the info. What are you wanting to do with xpath? The console supports the $x function, like $x("//body"). Also, HTML node drag and drop is on the radar here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858038

I want to get XPath from a node. I use it in WebDriverJS.

Good to see drag and drop coming.

There was some features that I loved. It's not fair to not mention those:

    CSS autocomplete is much better than Chrome’s
    Code Editor’s Search is just amazing!
    The filter for computed CSS properties is very handy for my work
    Black Theme is great! Please make it easy to write custom themes

One little request, in console. ⌘+K should clean the console.

I've filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=987877 for adding a Copy XPath menu item in the inspector

A long time ago I wrote a Firefox plugin to get an XPath:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xpath-checker...

It's open source, so perhaps you could reuse the code from WebDriver:

https://code.google.com/p/xpathchecker/

We have Ctrl-L for clear output.

⌘+K is consistent across other apps on OS X (e.g. Terminal)

But ^L is also consistent with Terminal, across all platforms, at least in bash and other programs that use readline. :)

We've had long discussions and arguing over cmd-k, ctrl-L, and all the shortcuts we could use. cmd-k takes over the search field focus.

This is a bitter pill: any shortcut we choose is a different kind of 'wrong'.

I'd throw in a vote for cmd+k to clear

I'm missing localStorage inspecting and editing. (If it's already there, please tell where :), I haven't really used Firefox developer tools much).

A storage inspector is not part of the tools yet. Some of the functionality for this has landed, but the frontend is still being worked on here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=970517.

In the console you can type: inspect(localStorage)

Thanks, but that's not usable enough for me.

You mean catch up to where DevTools are right now, by the end of the year? Firefox's tools have been behind Chrome's for years, I really don't see how Chrome's will "fall behind". You know Chrome has people working on it too, right?

Have you ever opened a bug for Chrome DevTools? I opened one for filtering computed CSS properties a year ago. It's not even triaged yet!

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