Comments on: Mozilla Foundation unveils dev tools

By: OtherMichael

OtherMichael — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:20:00 +0000

And here I am, stuck for months on a legacy web-project that uses ActiveX controls. So: Internet Explorer.

I see this and I look back at the IE9 “developer tools”, and I weep. Hot, viscid tears of jealousy.

By: ytpete

ytpete — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:01:00 +0000

The open-source Brackets editor has had this functionality for almost a year: http://brackets.io. It also automatically highlights DOM nodes that match the CSS rule your cursor is in, etc. JetBrains’s WebStorm also has live CSS editing in its latest version. It seems like Firefox is a little late to the party.

Ideally, if Firefox were to be compatible with the webkit remote debugging API, then those existing tools could work with Firefox too virtually “for free”…

By: Adam Lehman

Adam Lehman — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:38:00 +0000

Have you checked out Live Development in http://brackets.io? The idea is that your code can live in your editor, but update the browser through remote APIs. This eliminates the need for the “copy+paste dance”. Currently Brackets only supports Chrome, but hopefully FF will open up similar APIs.

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:30:00 +0000

The “turn off extensions” remark is caused by the fact that if your Firefox is slow, one of the third party extensions you installed is probably doing it. Turning them off confirms it and then you can reactivate them, one by one, to figure out which one. It isn’t Firefox’s fault if some idiot who can barely code writes a shitty extension and you install it in your browser.

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:29:00 +0000

When someone says “Firefox is slow,” I know that they haven’t run it in a long while and are working with out of date information.

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:28:00 +0000

When someone says “Firefox is slow,” I know that they haven’t run it in a long while and are working with out of date information.

By: Matthew Petty

Matthew Petty — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:26:00 +0000

Amaya is a tool from W3C that allows you to edit directly in the browser. http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

By: Restless

Restless — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:42:00 +0000

I love Firefox and it’s open-sourced, extension-laden goodness. However, I don’t like the incredible bloat and slowness of the browser. “Turn off extensions,” they say… then why use it? If I have to pick a browser that’s just a browser, I might as well use Chrome, because it’s a *lot* faster.

By: Corey Light

Corey Light — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:46:00 +0000

Textmate + Livereload + Compass + Chrome. Also, you can save your inspector edits through Chrome Canary (or it is at least planned).

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:52:00 +0000

the ability to do live edits in the text editor of your choice — effectively controlling Firefox with your editor

Dreamweaver has been (basically) doing this for about a decade? Granted, not always perfectly, that’s for sure. But, then again, what works in Firefox, certainly doesn’t always work in other browsers and/or look the same….

I know, I know… Dreamweaver sucks, etc. etc. at least for people who don’t realize it makes a great text editor (for the most part) in the last 5-7 years or so and know how to hack it to get SASS, etc. working properly.

By: libelle

libelle — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:55:00 +0000

Although I don’t use it often Chrome already has live edit (there’s some really fancy stuff when you do, say, angular.js development with JetBrains’ editor and Chrome).

Mozilla is in a complicated place right now, what with all but one of the corporate browsers going WebKit.

The good news is that the web standards are stable enough to make something developed for Firefox work correctly 99% of the time or better when viewed in a WebKit browser. If you are careful, it’s not hard to write pages that work correctly in just about every browser that anyone is using.

By: Gabe

Gabe — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 23:59:00 +0000

That fixes #3, but what about #1 and #2?

By: blacksmith_tb

blacksmith_tb — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 23:26:00 +0000

I can think of a snappy one-word comeback - Firebug.

By: Alex3917

Alex3917 — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 23:02:00 +0000

CodeKit for OS X already automatically refreshes all your browsers every time you save. Plus it also does a lot of other essential stuff, like automatically compiling your LESS/SASS code into CSS every time you save, stripping the meta-data out of images to reduce their size, etc.

By: Jonathan Vanasco

Jonathan Vanasco — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:57:00 +0000

Most developers I know hate Firefox, because it’s slow, buggy, and doesn’t have as good error logging as Safari or Chrome.

By: Shane Simmons

Shane Simmons — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:33:00 +0000

They’re too busy recreating Android in HTML5.

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:23:00 +0000

Haters gotta hate, I see.

By: Garymon

Garymon — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:01:00 +0000

While I agree authoring in the browser is rather meh. What would be useful is the ability to take the changes made in firebug to the html and css and push them back to your source editor when you want. Trying to find all the changes you made in firebug to fix a tricky UI bug can be a pain to get back into the source.

By: Restless

Restless — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:44:00 +0000

Great! Now maybe they can focus on fixing the bugs in their browser.

By: cleek

cleek — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:35:00 +0000

editing HTML right in your browser?

welcome to 1997! the editor was one of the things i hated most about Netscape.