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Comment by tyleregeto | Hacker News Reader

I love all the work the Firefox team is doing here over the last year. Things have improved so much, its terrific. These are the things Firefox needs before I could start to consider it as a primary development tool:

- Performance analyzation

- Resource management (cookies, local storage, etc)

- Option to completely disable cache when dev tools are open

- Ability to search the document in the inspector

I'm sure they'll get there before too long.

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I'm actually surprised developers using Firefox don't use firebug? It's great that Mozilla are improving the native tools but they are a long way from a moving goal post that is Firebug.

Already has an option to disable the cache. Advanced settings.

Thank you!

Edit: I can't find it. I see I can disable the cache completely, but that's not really what I want. Its nice to only disable it when the dev tools are open. I don't want to have to go to advance settings and clear it every time.

Why specifically "when the dev tools are open"? That seems like an unusually specific request.

This is how Chrome DevTools do it (by default), and it's incredibly useful. When I'm just browsing websites I want the cache enabled, but when I'm working on a site (in which case I usually have the DevTools opened) I want the cache disabled. In fact, I now just open the DevTools when I want to temporarily disable caching -- because the keyboard shortcut is so ingrained it's a lot easier to do that then find the overall browser setting itself.

I know that's how Chrome DevTools does it, but "because that's how Chrome DevTools does it" is not a good answer to the question "why specifically when the DevTools are open".

Because you don't want to disable caching of every other sites when you are not wearing your developer hat, just a "regular user surfing internet" hat.

Sounds like a case for using separate Firefox profiles, one for each "hat."

Why do that when I can just press "F12"?

That's not how it works. It only disables the tab you are working in.

This is exactly the point -- when you're developing a site, you want caching disabled on that site, but then when you're browsing another site just as a regular surfer you do not want caching disabled. Since generally when you're working on a site, you have DevTools opened, and generally when you're just browsing the web you do not have DevTools open, this is very nice.

I disagree with this:

> when you're developing a site, you want caching disabled on that site

I don't know why you say that. I only want caching disabled if I'm debugging something I think might be caused by caching.

"How Chrome DevTools does it" was not my answer to the question, it was just the preamble. As mentioned, I much prefer to have caching disabled while I'm building or debugging sites (specifically: because I'm often changing the markup or the css or the javascript, and I want my most recent change to come through to the browser upon reload).

Disabling the cache by default can be troublesome. I'd say it breaks the principle of least surprise - I wasn't aware of this behavior in Chrome, and it's a good thing I develop with Firefox, as I just resolved a bug that only manifested itself when bypassing the browser cache. If the browser cache had been linked to dev tools being open in my case, I probably would have ended up down some false causality rathole around dev tools.

We implemented it that way so that we wouldn't have a never ending list of "the browser is slow when devtools are open" bugs.

We do plan on making the disable cache toggle more visible (probably with the other buttons at the top of the main panel) and making it very obvious that the cache is disabled.

When we have done that it would make sense to have the button remember state.

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