1171939 - Make it possible to disable all panels from the settings

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(DevTools :: General, defect)

Description

[kud]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0
Build ID: 20150604030205

Steps to reproduce:

If the console is already at the bottom on every panel, you shouldn't have "console" in the list of buttons...?

Comment 1

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

Erwann and I discussed on IRC and came to this conclusion: the console panel should also be togglable from the settings panel, just like the webaudio editor.
If it was, then Erwann would disable it so the tab doesn't appear in the toolbox and would only use the split console.
When you have a rather big screen and expand the devtools to be tall, using the split console is nice because then you still have enough space for the other tools, and have the console always there. Also pressing ESC makes it very handy to go to the console quickly.

So, really, the goal here is to list *all* tools in the settings panel under the "Default Firefox Developer Tool" section so users can choose which panels they want to see.

Comment 2

[kud]

Perfectly summarised.

Comment 3

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

We used to allow this, but the functionality was removed since Console, Inspector, Debugger and Style Editor were considered as vital parts of the devtools, and it may cause confusion if one of those had been disabled by accident

Comment 4

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

(In reply to Tim Nguyen [:ntim] from comment #3)
> We used to allow this, but the functionality was removed since Console,
> Inspector, Debugger and Style Editor were considered as vital parts of the
> devtools, and it may cause confusion if one of those had been disabled by
> accident
By any chance, do you remember the bug number where this was done? I'm interested in reading up on the discussion. I don't find the argument very compelling to be honest.
If the vital panels are enabled by default (the very first time the user opens the toolbox), it will take the user a fair amount of research and clicking around to disable them, and so I expect the user to know what she's doing by then, therefore not being surprised when the vital panels aren't visible anymore.

Comment 5

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

One of the problems is that if you can disable the inspector, then the "Inspect Element" context menu item no longer works. Also, if you have enabled the console and click on a JS link, the source will open in the debugger if it's enabled or view-source if it isn't, which is not consistent behavior. The same holds for CSS files and the style editor.

Comment 6

[Helen V. Holmes (:helenvholmes) (:✨)]

(In reply to Tim Nguyen [:ntim] from comment #3)
> We used to allow this, but the functionality was removed since Console,
> Inspector, Debugger and Style Editor were considered as vital parts of the
> devtools, and it may cause confusion if one of those had been disabled by
> accident

I agree with Tim that being able to disable everything could cause some serious confusion. 

I think that along with this bug we should consider some sort of "Reset Devtools"-type of button.

Comment 8

[Helen V. Holmes (:helenvholmes) (:✨)]

(In reply to Erwann Mest from comment #0)
> User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:41.0)
> Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0
> Build ID: 20150604030205
> 
> Steps to reproduce:
> 
> If the console is already at the bottom on every panel, you shouldn't have
> "console" in the list of buttons...?

I've been thinking about this a little more after reading over the conversation, and after more thought I disagree with the first assumption that caused the bug to be open.

The console can be toggled from anywhere, but that isn't immediately obvious. Our tools need to be usable (and hopefully easy/obvious) for budding Javascript developers as well as the mid- to high-skill level folks. This goes for all of our tools. So, I don't think that all of our panels should be toggle-able, and on the list of things, I think drag'n'drop panels is way further up there :)

Comment 9

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

Marking as WONTFIX in light of comment 3, comment 5 and comment 8.
Also, I haven't seen this requested anywhere else so far.