Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

I used to use Firebug extensively. These days, the built-in Firefox developer tools seem to cover everything I need.

I find the Firefox dev tools very inferior to Chrome dev tools, missing a lot of "must have" features.

such as? not disagreeing, just wondering what you consider "must have" features that Firefox currently lacks.

Does FF have nice memory tools? I can't see any. I've come to rely a lot of Chromium built in mem tools: Heap snapshot (including diff between snapshots), Record Heap Allocations, Timeline.

Yes, extensively; try about:memory for a few of them.

To be fair, about:memory is designed to be used primarily by Firefox developers. Some web developers will be able to use it effectively, but it is quite intimidating.

Happily, memory profiling tools designed for use by web devs are being actively worked on.

To be honest, it is impressive the kind of detail about:memory manages to provide. But yes, it can be fairly intimidating. That is the problem I tried to address when I tried building a D3 backed front-end over it[1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fx-statistics...

I'm working on these tools now, finishing up initial platform work, should start on business logic/UI fairly soon here and get a version 0 out soon.

See http://fitzgeraldnick.com/weblog/54/ for some implementation details.

IIRC Firefox builtins don't have a cookie editor.

I've had trouble with them. They don't include inline stack traces for errors, so you have to do a lot more digging to find what happened and where. Also, in the Network panel, every refresh resets your filters so you have to select XHR every time if you don't want to see a bunch of .html/.js file requests (this may have been fixed in FF v30, haven't tested yet).

There are just a number of really small issues other than those that when you add them up, make the dev toolbar a lot less useful than Chrome. That said, I like Firefox the browser much better than Chrome.

> stack traces

Starting in Firefox 31, the console will display a full stack trace for errors

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Web_Console

If you're using nightly you already have had a lot of features like this for a while.

I find the dev tools in nightly a lot more useful than those in chrome and I prefer the way the dev tools are layed out in nightly. I also like the responsive design view, GCLI, and the eyedropper.

Same thing for me. I use Firefox as my main browser and I think it's far better than Chrome, but its native developer tools are just very confusing so I'm sticking with Canary as my development browser.

For me it's the interface - chrome dev tools are similar to what I learned with firebug, where as Firefox builtin tools don't make sense to me. When I need to debug something in Firefox I always install firebug and it's almost the same as if I'm debugging in chrome. Totally a UX thing for me... Happy firebug is still being worked on - it really changed the game in web development.

i feel the same way. firefox dev tools feel as if they were put together without much thought. a lot of features just thrown all over the place. I still use firebug mostly but chrome dev tools even if not as good as firebug are still a lot better than the firefox ones.

Not that I hate the Firefox devtools, but at the moment I'm using Chrome because there's no way to disable the caching of XMLHTTPRequests in Firefox, and I'm developing a Google Polymer app.

Mobile tools, especially user agent spoofing per tab and presets for different devices. And disabling of all caches when the developer tools are open.

Mobile development with Firefox is a pain compared to Chrome.

One of the features that Chrome has and that is just great is ability to connect resource in the webpage to the resource on your disk. This way, with other tools such as HostAdmin and PerfectPixel you can turn desinged page template into pixel perfect html pretty fast - you just play with the css values in the inspector and your changes write-through to the file on your disk.

If you are using Firefox for testing front-end, I suggest using Nightly as a copy for dev tool. You will get the latest goodies.

Easy way to install them both?

I hope this can help you: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2821799&s...

Just download and then use profile manager to open them.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

This way you can open as many firefox as you want.

Similarly, Dragonfly was one step above in my opinion. In-line editing was weird, but debugging, console, and network stuff suited me more. Now I use it alongside Chrome's default set, but I haven't even thought about firebug. I just assumed the firefox default replaced it.

Same here.

Can any current Firebug users comment as to what they like about it over the built-in tools?

I'm in the same boat, but I run into weird bugs.. like dev-tools inside my dev-tools, or some sort of split screen that I can't get rid of. I just restart them, but still weird

Ever since FF tools added the "clear" buttons in the Console and Network tab, they won me over

I got a similar question when someone asked me at a short firefox development tools demo I gave: when would I use firebug over native development tools? I didn't have a good answer. (they had noted I had firebug installed)

I liked firbugs javascript debugger a bit better. Firefox has been updating the tools alot lately though and I like them. Though sometimes they tend to flake out (javascript debugger blowing over breakpoints until restart...).

I'll give the new firebug a try.

The last thing that still bothers me (now that Firefox 30 added margin/padding highlighting) is that the built in dev tools don't have a way to manage cookies.

I like the built-in tools, but the two things I like in Firebug and use extensively are the DOM inspector and pretty printing JSON results in the Net panel for API calls.

Same here, but this feature list looks really nice. I might go back to Firebug.

It covers everything, but I prefer the UI of Firebug over Firefox and Chrome's built-in tools. Pretty pumped to try this out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com