Developer Tools (and the skin-of-developer-tools that is Firebug 2) are markedly inferior. From breakpoint- and file-management to the functional limitations and missing features around dom management... I miss the Firebug that died in FireFox 29.
...
Here's what I'd like DevTools to do:
* Make a breakpoints view, not one embedded into a massive list of unsorted (or sorted-by-load-date I guess?!) files that changes over time. If that can't be done (or is against the design philosophy of DevTools), letting me choose the sort order would be nice (e.g. recently-viewed files first, or files with breakpoints, etc ..... and uh, remembering those files and/or settings through refreshes would be fantastic... I miss it from Firebug 2). It's nice because after/during refreshes the breakpoint view lets you pull up the file the second it's loaded, instead of scrolling around in the file list until you find it.
* Make it a LOT more obvious when DevTools is stopped at a breakpoint.
* DevTools doesn't handle initial focus the way Firebug does. As in, when you pull up Firebug via the selection icon--oh, DevTools needs that selection icon for the toolbar--it goes straight to the dom node you selected.
* Make DevTools stop crashing. It stops working. Constantly. The console will just stop printing output, and the DOM view just stops displaying HTML, requiring a browser restart. (When this happens, if you, say, pull up the console and type "1" and hit enter, usually the console echos "1" back to you. When you're in this state, it's not echoed back, though, oddly, some script messages still pop in.)
* Make "debugger" start working again. There are some places where--for who knows what reason--both Firebug and DevTools have ignored breakpoints I've put in, and I've been able to get around it in Firebug by explicitly putting in "debugger;" into my code. You definitely know you're in deep kimchi when you need "debugger;".
Also, for one of my websites, it can't load the source. It just shows "eval" as the filenames over and over with nothing in them. Firebug 2 loads it just fine.
If I use the browser too long, the Inspector and Console tabs go blank.
Oh, and DevTools often doesn't honor my breakpoints. They "slide" down to the next line DevTools thinks it can actually stop on. Sometimes, once I restart my browser they'll work again.
For another, as a time-saver I put breakpoints on lines that /will/ be valid when I refresh (saves me from having to refresh the file twice), so it'd be grand if it simply honored the line i clicked rather than "sliding" down to the next valid one.
True, the v1 used internal API directly. They ported it to a newer API that is also used by Developer Tools.
Though even today, I prefer Firebug as I really like the good UI and it has several features that are nowhere to be found in neither Developer Tools in Firefox nor DevTools in Chrome nor F12 in IE11.
E.g. the "DOM" tab that let's one to view the DOM state - it's like working with Smalltalk/Squeak and its object browser window.
Developer Tools (and the skin-of-developer-tools that is Firebug 2) are markedly inferior. From breakpoint- and file-management to the functional limitations and missing features around dom management... I miss the Firebug that died in FireFox 29.
...
Here's what I'd like DevTools to do:
* Make a breakpoints view, not one embedded into a massive list of unsorted (or sorted-by-load-date I guess?!) files that changes over time. If that can't be done (or is against the design philosophy of DevTools), letting me choose the sort order would be nice (e.g. recently-viewed files first, or files with breakpoints, etc ..... and uh, remembering those files and/or settings through refreshes would be fantastic... I miss it from Firebug 2). It's nice because after/during refreshes the breakpoint view lets you pull up the file the second it's loaded, instead of scrolling around in the file list until you find it.
* Make it a LOT more obvious when DevTools is stopped at a breakpoint.
* DevTools doesn't handle initial focus the way Firebug does. As in, when you pull up Firebug via the selection icon--oh, DevTools needs that selection icon for the toolbar--it goes straight to the dom node you selected.
* Make DevTools stop crashing. It stops working. Constantly. The console will just stop printing output, and the DOM view just stops displaying HTML, requiring a browser restart. (When this happens, if you, say, pull up the console and type "1" and hit enter, usually the console echos "1" back to you. When you're in this state, it's not echoed back, though, oddly, some script messages still pop in.)
* Make "debugger" start working again. There are some places where--for who knows what reason--both Firebug and DevTools have ignored breakpoints I've put in, and I've been able to get around it in Firebug by explicitly putting in "debugger;" into my code. You definitely know you're in deep kimchi when you need "debugger;".
Also, for one of my websites, it can't load the source. It just shows "eval" as the filenames over and over with nothing in them. Firebug 2 loads it just fine.
If I use the browser too long, the Inspector and Console tabs go blank.
Oh, and DevTools often doesn't honor my breakpoints. They "slide" down to the next line DevTools thinks it can actually stop on. Sometimes, once I restart my browser they'll work again.
For another, as a time-saver I put breakpoints on lines that /will/ be valid when I refresh (saves me from having to refresh the file twice), so it'd be grand if it simply honored the line i clicked rather than "sliding" down to the next valid one.