1244337 - Pressing F5 on a breakpoint reloads the debugger scripts

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: Debugger, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

F5 is a common keyboard shortcut to resume execution. I pressed F5 on the debugger and all of the script sources were removed. Hitting F5 a second time then reloaded all the script sources.

From the looks of it, it looks like it's refreshing the debugger code.

Comment 1

[Eddy Bruel [:ejpbruel]]

(In reply to Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me) from comment #0)
> F5 is a common keyboard shortcut to resume execution. I pressed F5 on the
> debugger and all of the script sources were removed. Hitting F5 a second
> time then reloaded all the script sources.
> 
> From the looks of it, it looks like it's refreshing the debugger code.

That's because F5 is also used to refresh the page. As far as I know, every browser does this, so we can't really change this behavior. In theory, we could change the behavior of F5 when the debugger is open, but that would be confusing in my opinion. I understand that this is annoying, but I'm going to have to vote to not fix this.

Comment 2

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

This is breaking the Browser Debugger. Pressing F5 when the Browser Debugger is open and focused (it's a separate window) causes the scripts of the Browser Debugger to reload and I end up having to close it and reopen it to start debugging again (losing all breakpoints etc.)

The easiest solution (and one that would work for the normal webpage debugger, would be to show a confirmation dialog asking if the user wants to refresh the page). For the Browser Debugger we should bail out early.

Comment 3

[Eddy Bruel [:ejpbruel]]

I hadn't considered the browser debugging. Having a confirmation dialog sounds like a reasonable suggestion.

I'm going to mark this bug as P2, since it's essentially a UI papercut. Are you ok with that Jared?

Comment 4

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Yeah that's fine with me. Thanks :)

Comment 5

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

We should only do this on Windows, as F5 is used to resume debugging in Visual Studio but I'm not aware of other debuggers that use this keyboard shortcut.

Comment 6

[Jason Laster [:jlast]]

Harald, what do you think the right behavior is?

Comment 7

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

Given how integral page refreshing is during web development, adding any friction there needs to have strong arguments. So far we have one person affected by VS/Visual Code muscle memory.

I would put this in the bucket of customizable keyboard shortcuts.

If anybody else is affected, please share your story here to help us understand this better.