Firefox Aurora, the Firefox releases channel with the newest innovations now includes the new development tools so developers can inspect and tweak a web page’s HTML and CSS, accessing console, logs and even a nice feature called Scratchpad, to write JavaScript on the fly and execute it.
For a long time most developers relied on Firebug as their main development tool to edit web pages on Firefox. But the reality is that Firebug, understandably, is not being as actively developed as Chrome’s developer tools and they are starting to fall behind.
While I’ve moved from Firefox to Chrome as soon as it was released, I still used Firefox for a long time as my main development tool primarily due to Firebug. Since June this year, Chrome developer tools were dramatically improved, mainly in the user interaction of HTML and CSS editing. On top of that, it has (it always had) a much better design of the log of network transactions and resources than Firebug’s so it was a natural choice to completely shift to Chrome for all development.
Firefox will now try to regain web developers with the new built in tools, that look very interesting, specially the breadcrumb at the bottom with the ability to quickly select sibling elements.
You can install Firefox Aurora, the Firefox channel with the newest additions, enhancements and overall innovations, and try them today.
So basically Firefox is now integrating all the ability we had before with Firebug with a slightly better interface? Anything new under the sun?
I still prefer Firebug to Chrome’s developer tools though, it’s way more comfortable.
Granted this is not new and it needs a bunch of improvements but it’s a step in the right direction for FF.
Chrome’s editing tools might not be as versatile as Firebug’s (and as of version 17.0.963.x it’s a bit buggy) but they are adding features all the time. The area which is really ahead of others is the resources and network view.
Still, the ability to select siblings in FF Aurora is pretty useful once you use it (although nobody would switch browser for a tiny feature like that) so others browsers could pick up this feature where Aurora left.
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