1284012 - Developer Tools should support an always enabled mode and / or per domain activation

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Andreas Jung]

To debug websites / apps that open new tabs or windows it would be useful if the Firefox developer tools would support the firebug activation modes [1].

To do network analysis / debugging it actually might be necessary: waiting for the tab to open, reopening the developer tools + network panel for the new tab and reloading the tab often isn't an option as the reload will produce different results from the initial load.

[1] http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Activation

Comment 1

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Seems like an interesting feature to consider!

Comment 3

[prosp4300]

Although the title point to "Developer Tools", the main focus and people most interesting in is at "Network" and "Debugger" panels, such feature is well supported in a bunch of tools already but looks pretty difficult(long time missing) to have in both Firefox DevTool and Chrome DevTool, is it possible due to problem with the architecture?

Comment 4

[seba.busch]

In Chrome there's a "Auto-open DevTools for popups" preference.

In addition to such a global and/or per-domain setting, it would be perfect to implicitly auto-open developer tools on new windows originating from a window with already opened developer tools. That IMO doesn't need an option on settings, but if it gets an option it should be separate from the more general "Auto-open DevTools for popups" option, and the behaviour could be enabled by default.

Third, as redirects and logs are missed in case of redirects for new pages even with this/these new feature(s), a new window with auto-opened developer tools should implicitly preserve logs and network activity. To avoid any confusion, this should not be achieved by automatically enabling the "preserve logs" checkboxes.

Comment 5

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

seba, great point on how this relates to preserve logs – the option should indeed preserve as much state as possible to make it seamless. Given how notoriously hard multi-window apps are to debug, I would default to having this option on by default (maybe with a hint the first time it auto-opens a toolbox).

:bgrins, how useful would that be for general Firefox development?