1434065 - Port Developer tools to Android

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(DevTools :: General, enhancement)

Description

[laem]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) SamsungBrowser/6.4 Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I cannot find a way to open the console or dev tools on Firefox for Android.


Actual results:

 I suppose it's just not bundled in the browser. 


Expected results:

As far as I know, they are included in the standard edition (not the developer edition) on the desktop. Hence I suppose it's not a matter of size added to the bundle, but a matter of incompatibility with Firefox for Android, or simply because no one assumes one would debug a website on a mobile device.

But mobile devices can now be more powerful than two-year old laptops, and more and more people will use Android as a work setup following Samsung's and Huawei's desktop modes. That's more than 50 million devices sold with this potential. More if tablets used with physical keyboards are counted.

Comment 1

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

At least part of devtools are included even on Android in order to support connecting from Desktop via WebIDE if I'm not mistaken, but if additional files were necessary to actually display the UI on Android itself then APK size very much *is* a concern here. Making them installable on demand (at least on Release/Beta) might be a way forward, though.

Comment 2

[Bogdan Surd, QA [:bsurd, NI]]

As per Comment 0 & Comment 1 this could be useful as a feature implementation in the future in order for the users to not need to connect to a computer for debugging.

Comment 3

[laem]

What I understand is that most of the devtools have been rewritten in HTML/JS.

Would it then be possible to ship it as an extension ? Is it currently possible, or is the extension system in Quantum too limiting ? Would it work on Firefox for Android ?

Comment 4

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

I doubt this will ever happen. Using the devtools remotely from a desktop computer is the way to inspect websites, JS, network requests, etc.

Comment 5

[Boris Ribalkin]

I really need a way to be able to open dev tools on a mobile at any cost as I am often in a situation where I have no other device with me.
I do web development on my phone on the go and at times there is no internet.

I would like to know if it disabled because it will look ugly on a small screen or there are technical reasons?

Comment 6

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

You can connect to remote devices and inspect the development websites using the instructions here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Remote_Debugging

I'm afraid that we have no intention to port the tools to work as an addon on Firefox for Android at the moment. The effort required would be quite spectacular. It's simply easier to connect remotely. You don't need external Internet connectivity, only having the devices in the same network (including ad hoc wifi connections).