1846825 - Add Debugger setting to hide debug overlay

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(DevTools :: Debugger, defect, P3)

Description

[jeremy.leland]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/118.0

Steps to reproduce:

Hit a breakpoint in Javascript code.

Actual results:

The web page is covered with a white debug overlay indicating Javascript execution is paused. I would like to disable this, as I'm trying to debug canvas drawing operations and the white overlay makes it harder for me to see what is going on.

Expected results:

Bug 1579768 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579768) says we can hide the debug overlay by setting devtools.debugger.features.overlay to false. However, this doesn't seem to work in nightly 118 -- searching for that setting showed no results, and adding it didn't make a difference.

The page at https://github.com/firefox-devtools/ux/issues/88) shows some discussion on UI to toggle it, but the discussion stopped in 2019 without clear resolution.

Is there still a way to hide this overlay in nightly 118?

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'DevTools::Debugger' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

We recently removed this preference, but we can try to reintroduce it with a better implementation.

Is there still a way to hide this overlay in nightly 118?

Sadly no, but you can follow this bug to get updates on when this feature will be available again.

Comment 3

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

The devtools.debugger.features.overlay pref was added back in Bug 1865439.
We should add a setting in the UI to make it easy to control it

Comment 4

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Attachment: Bug 1846825 - [devtools] Add Debugger setting to toggle the paused overlay. r=#devtools.

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/bb9b6af45e1e
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/4b319745a7f8
[devtools] Add Debugger setting to toggle the paused overlay. r=devtools-reviewers,bomsy,jdescottes.

Comment 6

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/4b319745a7f8

Comment 7

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Attachment: Bug 1846825 - [devtools] Add documentation for Debugger Paused overlay setting. r=#devtools.

Comment 8

[Phabricator Automation]

Comment on attachment 9502486 [details]
Bug 1846825 - [devtools] Add documentation for Debugger Paused overlay setting. r=#devtools.

Revision D258444 was moved to bug 1978864. Setting attachment 9502486 [details] to obsolete.

Comment 9

[Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]]

This should be added to the release notes on MDN (or are you not doing that anymore?) and the general ones.

[Why is this notable]: Allows DevTools users to control the display of the Debugger Paused overlay.
[Affects Firefox for Android]: no
[Suggested wording]: The Debugger offers a new setting to control whether the debugger overlay is shown on paused script execution.
[Links (documentation, blog post, etc)]:
https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/firefox-dev/c/K10AAK60Hk4/m/zLeXOwSQCQAJ
https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/files/2025/08/headlines184_3.png

Sebastian

Comment 10

[Dianna Smith [:diannaS]]

Added to the 142 release notes