~robcee/ more than just sandwiches

Inspector and Console in Firefox 4 Beta 5

update: I had to back the tree panel out due to leaks on the debug boxes. Need to spend some time analyzing the patch to see where it’s coming from.

It’s been a bit of a crazy week. A crazy couple of weeks if the truth be told. The pace of checkins and change on the Firefox codebase has been staggering. Record-breaking by some accounts.

As Kevin Dangoor mentioned earlier this week, we are now an actual group of developers instead of just a couple of guys banging on code. We’ve inherited members of the Bespin team and in a very short while have made some really exciting progress on these tools. I can honestly say that I’m thrilled to be working with such a talented bunch of guys and am going to really miss our awesome interns. Mihai Sucan and Julian Viereck have been monsters of code these past few weeks and have been submitting patches at a furious pace. So much so that our reviewers are having a hard time keeping up.

Review load has been pretty heavy. One of the biggest pieces we’ve been waiting on and dragging around is the tree-panel patch which I’ve blogged about before. Weighing in at somewhere near 200KB of JS and CSS, it was not something I’d relish having to review myself. Gavin made it through though, and earlier today, gave me the green light to land it. It should finally be in Beta 5.

We’ve got even more awesome stuff coming in for the next beta including an all new Style Panel courtesy of Joe Walker with help from Mihai and CSS and HTML editors from Patrick Walton and myself. With those features and a few other niceties, I think we’ll be able to start calling the Inspector a useful tool and something that people will want to use.

The Web Console’s been pulling along too and it’s starting to really take shape. I’m already using it for simple tasks like modifying bits of the DOM through the JS command line or drilling into objects to see what they’re doing. In Beta 5 you’ll see an actual object inspector (shared between it and the Inspector) as well as a new Network Panel from Julian. Patrick’s been piling on the patches to make it look prettier and his efforts are starting to pay off. David Dahl’s been busy working on getting a lightweight Console API in place that web pages will be able to use and hopefully other consumers will want to make use of.

So yeah. I’m just going to take a moment to thank everybody for their help and reflect on what an awesome project this has been.

Sorry to be a downer, but I still don’t understand what audience rewriting Firebug inside the browser is going to serve. I went back and re-read “Inspector Impetus” extra carefully, too. I just don’t see any Firebug users having a reason to use the native tools, and I wouldn’t expect anyone who can’t find Firebug to get good use out of this either. Even if they would, what’s the argument against just bundling Firebug with Firefox again?

while its nice to hear your making progress and the project is starting to come together, I am still unconvinced that there is a market/need for this when the developers that would possibly use this are probably already using firebug?

It feels like this time could have been better spent working on porting firebug into a native toolset which caters for both the designer/novice developer your trying to target with this and also the rest of us developers already using firebug.

That aside Im looking forward to hopefully testing this out when b5 lands, as it doesn’t want to work at all in the copy of Fx4.0b4 Im running, the latest nightly I have installed at work plays up too last I checked, the inspector has a bit of a moment and wont allow me to do anything due to an over-keen overlay so the only thing I can do with it is press ctrl+shift+i to close it

cool! just can wait to see the final version of firefox 4, i’m using the beta version and it is just amazing !

I do not know who to address this to so am putting it here thinking you may know.

There is a need for a Mozilla Firefox-like way to publish books that could be read from laptop or desktop computer. For my own private, non-public use I have HTMLed quite a number of older books that are no longer in print. The results are far more useful than paper versions and than what I have seen of Kindle et. al.

I am interested in experimental, natural-sustainable small farming. I used to work as a hardware, software, systems engineer at places like Hughes Aircraft, Sony and Walt Disney. Problems of the Earth seem the important issues of our time – Global Warming, water, food security, excessive reliance upon industrial/chemical means, etc. – thus our interest in doing R&D for small farming now. I have been HTMLing small farming related books to use on a Mac Airbook so that I can have instant access to information wherever I am. It offers great advantages. I can create one overall index related to bees, goats, poultry, soil & plant quality, etc. and very quickly access useful information anywhere I am … with or without Internet access. A typical HTMLed book with pictures and drawings is 6 to 12 MBytes. I will never get around to HTMLing enough books to fill even half of a 128 GByte semiconductor disk on an Airbook.

A related area of interest is packing with goats (I used to teach dog packing seminars at REI but goats make far more sense). We have not done this but plan to in the future. A flexible panel over the panniers and pack saddle of a goat can recharge batteries for: digital camera, video camera, SW radio, HAM radio, cell phone, iPad, Airbook … and can charge batteries to power LED camp lights and a 12 VDC UV bug zapper. So some of the books I have HTMLed are for goat packing. But also books on wildflower, tree & shrub, bird, medicinal plant and etc. identification with pictures and drawings. On an Airbook these will be useful on the trail.

My goal in telling you these things is to try and convince someone at Mozilla that your Firefox browser could potentially be (already is in our case) a very useful way to read books and really carry along a library of books wherever we are … Internet connected or not. Think of the potential this could have for Doctors Without Borders in Africa or Pakistan floods. There are so many potential uses.

All of the proprietary Kindle-like book readers seem a wrongheaded direction to me. I want Open software. I want a regular computer or especially laptop/iPad to read books from. I want a way that is not OS or platform dependent. I should be able to carry one laptop/iPad/iPhone and use its conventional functionality plus read books and carry along whatever library of books is useful to me. Mozilla Firefox already offers most of the useful functionality for reading books and managing a library of books.

What is missing is a way for authors and artists – media creators – to protect their work and gain fair compensation for their efforts. If it weren’t for this one missing feature on Firefox I am confident all of the proprietary book readers would become obsolete technology. Firefox is potentially the Open printing press-like technology that hundreds of years ago made book publishing economical and created a huge advance in human learning. An Open system is needed for publishing books – new ones and all the existing ones. Letting Google or anyone else monopolize World libraries will be a huge mistake. The very best alternative is for Mozilla to offer up an Open way of publishing books … an only relatively minor adaptation – really fairly trivial – of the wonderful web browser Mozilla already provides.

Thanks for considering this idea.

Hi Ed,

Thanks for the comment, though I really think that this is a little off-topic from my original message. Your suggestion has some good ideas though and I’ll forward it along to some friends of mine that may have interest.

In the future, you should consider setting up a blog of your own for publishing these types of ideas. Burying your excellent suggestions in a comment in an unrelated blog post is not a great way to get people to read your thoughts.

Aside to the people posting comments about Firebug: I’ve written about this before and I’m not going to do it again. Please search this blog and others. Thanks.

@Gavin & james baker
You’d think by now they would have written something somewhere clearly answering that question and just throw the link at everyone who keeps asking this question over and over. But it seems they haven’t.

we have.

http://blog.johnath.com/2010/03/10/developer-tools-in-firefox/

and,

http://antennasoft.net/robcee/2010/05/21/inspector-impetus/

Maybe it would help if I just prepended those to any and all future posts.

I didn’t mean any disrespect to you, sorry if it appeared that way. I did read your previous posts before I wrote my comment but the reason I posted here rather than on the post where you explained the reasons for starting the project was that its already 3 months old and I don’t like posting on old posts. Plus I thought it was relevant…

On the plus side I have found the extension that was causing the problems I was having in minefield (was MR Tech Toolkit) so have disabled it and can now have a little play with your tools