Sign in / up

back to article Mozilla emits JavaScript debugger for Firefox and Chrome

Mozilla developers have released a new JavaScript debugger for Firefox. It's hoped the new "Debugger.html" will replace todays XUL-based debugger, which the project's Bryan Clark describes as “incredibly hard to change”. That may not necessarily happen, because Clark notes there's another team in Firefox that's working on …

COMMENTS

Post your comment
House rules Send corrections
Add to 'My topics' unstar *
  1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

    Money wasting?

    If the two developer teams were made up of volunteers, then this duplicate work could be excused as people scratching their personal itch.

    But I suspect the two teams are employed by the Mozilla foundation to work on Firefox. Which means one of them is wasting their time & Mozilla's money, so someone at the top is asleep at the wheel.

    2 0 Reply
    1. DrXym
      Reply Icon

      Re: Money wasting?

      I could see merit in both approaches.

      A standalone Javascript debugger that can attach to Chrome, NPM or Firefox is obviously a good thing. I could have a running browser and I could attach to it remotely from an IDE or something like Atom and start debugging it.

      On the other hand, Javascript debugging is just one development tool you want in a browser. You want to see and modify css rules, see loading times, http headers, HTML/DOM, cookies etc. and you want to be able to contextually between things where it makes sense, e.g. In Firefox I can set a breakpoint when an HTML element changes. The debugger isn't something that happens in isolation.

      2 0 Reply
      1. Dan 55 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Money wasting?

        They're probably making short-term fixes to the XUL version while developing the new version for when they throw XUL under the bus.

        Which is a big mistake, but they never really did anything to make XUL an open standard apart from half-heartedly push out a runtime and a bit of some documentation. It needed a lot of work by the developer to make a XUL runtime app.

        2 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dear Ad Script Writers

    You don't have an excuse now, please for fuck's sake just use it.

    2 0 Reply
  3. Buzzword

    Two teams = competition

    I like the idea of having two teams in competition with each other. It's just A/B testing on your developers' ideas. Also gives you an excuse to fire the guy who says "hey this would be a lot quicker to develop in Ruby!"

    6 0 Reply
  4. Gene Cash Silver badge
    FAIL

    People still use Firefox?

    Most of the world I know has moved on, and considers Firefox to be about as useful as IE 6. I'm probably the closest, since I use Palemoon instead of Chrome or Edge.

    0 10 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Gimp

    i think it's alright...

    I use FF out of preference for browsing - I just like it more than Chrome. Marginally. As a dev I use Chrome for debugging - I find it a bit easier for JavaScript & TypeScript debugging, even if I do find the menu structure somewhat infuriating. Overall this is good news on the debugger. I'm sure other devs are the same. Right now I have 7 different browsers on my task bar. That's not counting browsers in VMs and on various tablets and phones I have laying around for testing purposes. Anything that makes debugging across all a little simpler is good news.

    0 0 Reply

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

Forgotten password ?

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like