1334299 - Option to disable logging of console messages while the console is closed

Status: REOPENED

(DevTools :: Console, enhancement, P3)

Description

[sworddragon2]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20161213225349



Actual results:

For example even if the web console is closed it still logs messages which can cause a significant performance impact if too many messages are being logged (for example if javascript.options.strict is set to true as shown in bug #1318178).


Expected results:

Since normal users don't need the web console it should probably not log messages at default (which is the case in Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge if I'm not wrong). Console messages should then be logged if the web console is opened and an option could be provided to permanently enable console logging again.

Comment 1

[Soledad Penades [:sole] [:spenades]]

I believe we did some work to fix this. Alex, can you confirm?

Comment 2

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

All the message that would go to the console are put in a cache when the console is closed.
When the console is opened, we retrieve the messages from the cache (and then display "live messages").
I think we cover the original goal of this bug.
Furthermore, and I think it's what Sole refers to, we don't print anything to the console if it is not visible (i.e. if the user is in another devtools panel) to avoid doing extra work.

Comment 3

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

Actually, comment 0 was not refering to the console UI/actors being slow, but only to the platform code that fills in this cache and prints to stdout.

Some work has been done in bug 1382377, to really disable any extra overhead the console might be introducing (cache and stdout printing). This work is based on a new preference "devtools.enabled", but so far, we never set it to false.
Julian has been pushing experiments to gather data on Devtools usages and see how we could finally toggle this preference to false by default. But this has not being landed in the final product.

I think this bug is still valid and would depend on setting devtools.enabled to false by default. I believe this work is being tracked by meta bug 1408969.