1105503 - hide / block access to Developer Tools until user opts in

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1356226

(DevTools :: General, defect)

Description

[jokeyrhyme]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

In a brand new user profile:
1. check the Tools menu
OR
1. right-click and check context menu for a web page


Actual results:

Even for brand new user profiles, the Developer Tools are accessible, which can lead to confusing situations for such users.


Expected results:

In a brand new user profile, there should be no possible way for Developer Tools to be engaged, accidental or otherwise. There should be no menu items, key bindings, etc.

Safari has an option so that developers have to enable such tools via an advanced checkbox. Android has this functionality hidden behind multiple taps to the build number.

Comment 1

[Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]]

I disagree with that suggestion. While it would avoid confusion for non-webdevs accidentally clicking the option, this makes it harder for web developers to get to know and access the DevTools. And closing the tools can easily be done via the X at the top of the tools, which is a standard UI users know from their OS.

Sebastian

Comment 2

[jokeyrhyme]

Yeah, that's similar thinking to the response I got over at Chromium: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=437054

I'm torn: as a developer and a fan of the open-web, I definitely think it's important that Developer Tools be easy to find and use; but as someone with customers of varying levels of technical experience, it seems like quite a foot-gun /shrug

Comment 3

[Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]]

The Chromium people explained this quite well.

The use case you mentioned in the Chromium ticket can easily be covered by providing a documentation for the CMS. Nontheless I get your point that users may accidentally misunderstand them as tools for editing a website.

Therefore I have now created bug 1388637 asking for a notification shown the first time the DevTools are run to mitigate this misunderstanding.

I mark this as WONTFIX for the reasoning I outlined earlier, but feel free to discuss this in the DevTools IRC channel[1].

Sebastian

[1] irc://irc.mozilla.org/devtools

Comment 4

[Gabriel Luong [:gl] (ΦωΦ)]

I am marking this as DUPLICATE of Bug 1356226.

DevTools are actually progressing into becoming a system add-on for the reasons you will see in Bug 1356226, and will be available on demand similar to Safari and Edge.