The first of these features is somewhat complementary to the Page Inspector and lives in its own window. The Style Editor is the hard work of Cedric Vivier and is a unique tool for editing CSS in the Web Browser. You can edit styles in a web page and immediately see the results. When you have something you like, you can save the CSS to disk and incorporate the changes on your website.

To access it, use Shift-F7.

It would be grossly unfair to not thank Paul Rouget, Dão Gottwald and Stephen Horlander for their great work reskinning the Style Editor for this release. Paul did a fantastic job on the styling while Dão kept the reviews flowing, none of which would have been possible without Stephen’s brilliant colors and design tweaks.

Another major feature we’ve landed in Firefox 11 is Tilt – a 3D View of the page’s DOM. Last year around this time, I suggested this as a possible alternative to the standard highlighter view most inspectors give developers. That became a Google Summer of Code project implemented by the more-than-capable Victor Porof who later managed the port to Firefox itself with reviews from Cedric Vivier and Benoit Jacob.

We have yet to see what kind of impact this sort of visualization has for developers, but I think as more people get used to having it, it’s going to become an invaluable tool for acquiring a high-level overview of the structure of a web-page and eventually, become a useful playground for manipulating and interacting with the structure of the page itself.

I’m really interested to see what people can do with this. We’re already seeing some strange and interesting applications of it on the web, but I think having a 3D library capable of rendering these types of meshes in Firefox itself is going to be an interesting area for exploration.

Happy 2012!

We had a bug to add the original keybinding back, but for several good reasons this wasn’t done. If you feel strongly about it, comment in that bug and we’ll consider reopening it. This is a limited-time-offer, though, and if you don’t get your opinions in before December 20th, I’m afraid we’ll just leave it WONTFIXed.

If this is hugely painful for you because you’ve gotten used to and love this keyboard shortcut and find it impossible to learn a new key, you can also download Tim Taubert’s tremendous add-on Customizable Shortcuts on AMO (or github!).

“But, you can already do that with the Rule View in the Page Inspector thing in Aurora,” I can hear you protest. That’s true, you’re absolutely right, but with the Style Editor, you’re editing all of the CSS files in an editor. Not just the rules applied to a specific node. This has some nice properties.

1. You get to use Orion. Complete with prettified CSS so it’ll even work on sites that have minified their style sheets.

2. You can easily save or export changes you make. This is a huge benefit when you want to tweak some styling and then get it back into the original source.

3. It’s awesome.

Please try it out and file bugs if you find them. We love that. We have a few tweaks we want to land before we ship it to Aurora, but if you spot any bad behavior, we’d like to know about it.

If that weren’t enough, we have a Debugger getting ready to make its debut in Mozilla Central and Nightly builds. It likely won’t be turned on at first as we work to beef up its capabilities. But soon, over the next release or two, this will become available debug your JavaScript. I’ll talk more about that when it’s ready.

But, do you know what’s really cool? We have contributors showing up in our IRC channel and submitting patches. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen no fewer than 5 new “faces” in our IRC channel talking to the developers, filing bugs and submitting patches. This is fantastic stuff! For most people, their time from zero experience with Mozilla code to first patch is a day or two. Most of the hard work is setting up the build environment on their systems and wrangling with Mercurial to get the code onto their machine.

Extra thanks and kudos to, sonny, hardfire, nigelb, soswow and anybody I may have missed. The Web Console has never looked better.

What we’ve landed is in some ways just a beginning. We have a bunch of great features planned for it that will include multiple selection by selector, annotated selected nodes, richer editing of HTML and CSS and a whole bunch of things that… well, you’ll just have to see what’s coming in the next version. I am seriously excited about what we’re doing with this.

That said, there are some things that the Highlighter could do better. I have a few tips for you:

The Web Console and the Selected DOM node

Open the Inspector on a web page, use this one if you want, and highlight a node (click it to “lock” the inspector in place). Next, open the Web Console. On the command line, type, inspect($0).

This will open an Object Inspector on the selected node. $0 can be used to inspect and modify that node via the console with JavaScript.

The Scratchpad and Highlighter

What if you want to do more with your nodes? Maybe you want to select something but only know it by a selector?

Open a Scratchpad and set it to the Browser Environment (if you haven’t already, set devtools.chrome.enabled to true in about:config and then select “Browser” from the Environment menu in your Scratchpad).

Enter and run the following:

function $(aString) {
    InspectorUI.inspectNode(gBrowser.contentDocument.querySelector(aString));
}

now when you execute $(“body”) (or any other selector in that function), the Inspector will highlight the first node that matches that selector.

$0 in Scratchpad

Enter and run the following:

this.__defineGetter__("$0", function() { return InspectorUI.selection; });

Now with a selected element in the Highlighter, you can evaluate $0 and use it to reference the selected element.

$0.click() will click the element, for example.

Save this Scratchpad as something like “Inspector.js” (I called mine “dolla-0″) and load it up when you want to do some playing around with the inspector. Add to it and dig around. Keep in mind that the InspectorUI object is a chrome object and you can potentially break things. Hopefully you find some cool tricks along the way. Make sure to share them!

In my earlier years, I was always intrigued by the story of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, well before reading the steam-punk confection of the same name by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Even more intriguing was the woman in the story, the Lady Ada Lovelace. Ostensibly, the world’s first computer programmer, she didn’t let a minor thing like not having an actual computer to work with hold her back. She was a visionary, her mind exceeding the technical capabilities of the day to foresee a world of general purpose, programmable computation machinery.

Like many others, I still find her a fascinating character; a noble, the daughter of the darkly-twisted poet Lord Byron, perhaps a little sickly, taking interest in an intellectual exercise inhabited entirely by men and producing code! What would she think of software and computing today? Of the social aspects of open source code? Would she find it mendacious and boring because anybody could do it or would she take it to new and exciting places?

Things are different today, though not as much as we might like. Women have made considerable contributions to the fields of math and computer science. Names like Adele Goldberg, Anita Borg and Grace Hopper command well-deserved reverence. I have the great fortune to work alongside some truly brilliant women here at Mozilla, both in code and within other important areas of the organization. I live with one of them and if I didn’t think it would be a little awkward for both of us, I could tell you just how inspiring she has been to me. I think Lady Ada would be pleased to know any of them.

(I tried to find an image of Grace Hopper and some old machinery, but I couldn’t find anything CC-licensed. Instead, I will link to the Flickr Blog post which has some neat pics).

You can revert to the textarea-based editor by changing devtools.editor.component to textarea.

If you do, please tell us why you did that! Thanks.

Devtools Highlighter Integration Build, August 7, 2011, click to view on flickr.

For this build, we wanted to get some feedback on the Highlighter and Style Inspector pieces themselves. Specifically, the attribute editing in the HTML panel (bug 575234), the layout of the Style Inspector’s contents (bug 672748), the breadcrumbs in the highlighter toolbar (bug 672006) and the selected node’s “infobar” (bug 663833).

A couple of points about this build: The HTML panel and Style panels are not enabled by default. To access them, you have to press the Style and HTML buttons on the highlighter’s toolbar at the bottom of the screen. The toolbar itself and buttons are not styled yet and will be taken care of in bugs 676253 and 676255.

Note that there are bound to be bugs in this build. The unittests haven’t been completely written for each of these features yet and for some of them, it’s the first time they’ve lived together. Nevertheless, if you find bugs, feel free to file them in Firefox::Developer Tools. We’ll either dupe[1] them or use them to create more tests.

Thanks for testing! Comments in bugs are preferred to blog comments, but we’ll what we can get.

1 – Duplicate. In a Bugzilla context, mark it as RESOLVED DUPLICATE of another, pre-existing bug.

Hi,

I have a present for you.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-devtools/

If you go there and download the version for your operating system, you can get a sneak preview of what we’ve been working on in the Developer Tools group. It is a little rough around the edges still as it’s all a work in progress, but it gives you an idea of what we’re working towards.

The features can be found in the Web Developer submenu in the app menu on Windows (aero) and Linux or under the Tools>Web Developer menu on Mac and WinXP or Linux Firefoxes without the AppMenu.

The big feature in this build is the Highlighter available through the Inspect menu item (subject to change). It’s still using a panel for the HTML display, but that is going to be docked and de-emphasized soon enough. There’s a Style panel available through the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. The layout of this panel is going to change very shortly as well to provide more immediate access to the information you’re looking for.

The other cool easter egg in this build is the Orion editor in Scratchpad. I’m kind of ruining the surprise by telling you about it, but I just couldn’t help myself.

I’ll kick off another build in a week or two including the Style Editor and some improvements to the Web Console as well as ongoing additions to the Highlighter. Note that the updater will download the latest Nightly from mozilla-central, so if you let it update, you’ll lose this build.

Please let us know what you think. Here on this blog, on d.a.f, or file bugs against the Firefox::Developer Tools component.

I hope you like it.
Rob