Mozilla Firefox Developer Edition was released towards the end of 2014.
On SitePoint we covered the release which coincided with Mozilla’s 10th anniversary, and the article was extremely popular, with many on social media sounding excited to give it a shot.
I haven’t heard much at all since the launch, except for the odd bug complaint:
Some day, Firefox Developer Edition will load GitHub. When it does, I will be but a pile of bones on a chair.
I haven’t personally downloaded or used it. I was going to, but then I read a lot of comments that basically gave me the impression that the dev version doesn’t have anything really developer oriented loaded on to it and that loading developer plugins was up to the user.
Yeah, I do most of my development in Chrome but when I do my Firefox testing, I feel the same way.
I think it’s because the Developer Edition is too much like Chrome and just displays things slightly differently, but extremely familiar. So it’s kind of unsettling and a little confusing because it’s not exactly the same. Where as the regular version with maybe Firebug is a bit different.
I do all my testing in IE, because it’s easier to make it in IE then later make it look good in FF/Chrome than it is to develop for FF/Chrome then make it work in IE.
Debugging in IE is terrible tho. IE 8 and 9 don’t even recognize console.log() unless the console is actually open. It throws a JS error and breaks everything. And the live CSS manipulation is clunky. I usually fine tune styles in the inspector before putting them in the *.css file.
We have to support back to IE8 and we have IE9 installed, because Enterprise.
Doing almost ANYthing in IE is terrible, especially debugging. So - I test in IE, and if there is an issue that I can’t immediately figure out, I open the same page in FF with Firebug on, fix it, then get back to testing in IE.
I’ve been using Firefox Dev since it was released, it’s a great tool, all the extensions that I used with regular Firefox seem to work fine with it also.
I feel like it’s just a thing to keep an eye on right now (for me). Chrome is without contest my favorite browser, and I’m comfortable with it - but I’d always like to see a good dev tool grow, so… it’s on my “app watch list”
I completely agree with this. Competition is good and Chrome Dev Tools have been without competition for a while. Firebug can actually do a few things a little better, but if you need those things you can always just install Firebug Lite on Chrome. lol
I tried it. It’s fine but little different to the standard version of Firefox unless you’re using a cutting-edge feature. It was reasonably useful to have two versions of Firefox open - one for browsing, one for development - but I rarely did that.
A couple of minor points:
FDE enables some features which aren’t available in the standard Firefox. If you’re not careful, you could rely on a technology which isn’t commonly available.
FDE updates itself every day because it’s based on nightlies. That’s good - but it can also be extremely irritating.
I find the DOM Inspector to be fantastic for trying to debug something you know pretty much nothing about. It’s much cleaner and much more organized than typing window in the console.
But that’s not something I use often, because I’m usually working in code that I’m already familiar with and know what to look for. It’s actually been >6mo since I needed to use it. There very well could be something in Chrome, besides outputting window in the console, that does the same thing.
Also, the CSS inspector is a little nicer for actually editing the live cache version of the CSS file. I actually don’t know if you can do that in Chrome. I usually just make live edits in the Elements pane, but then stuff like pseudo selectors is kind of a pain… speaking of that… is there a way to do that in Chrome? For pseudos, I usually just edit the actual CSS and F5 it.
I’ve used it and have kept it on my machine but I eventually went back to using Chrome after a few day’s. There wasn’t anything available that made it stand out from regular Firefox for me.
In Chrome’s Dev tools, the styles of a pseudo-element are visible in the panel:
In short, I love Chrome’s dev tools. There are so many cool things you can do with them. FF would have to do something revolutionary to make me switch.
