1884893 - Remote profiling in about:debugging requires too many clicks

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: Performance Tools (Profiler/Timeline), enhancement, P3)

Description

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

I find the remote profiling UI in about:debugging slow to use. When everything works well, it takes me at least 4 clicks to start the profiler in a browser I have restarted on the phone.
The 4 clicks are :

• click the "connect" button on the sidebar next to the browser name.
• click the browser name in the sidebar after the connection has been established (could this one be automatic?)
• click the "Profile performance" button, this opens the profiler panel.
• click the "Start recording" button in the profiler panel. Could we maybe make the "Profile performance" button similar to the Firefox desktop toolbar button, where the big button would start profiling, and a smaller button would open the panel? This way we would not need to open the profiler panel every time.

These suggested changes would get the flow down to 2 clicks. We could even consider adding a keyboard shortcut for the profiler button, to get the flow down to 1 click on the "connect" button.

Comment 1

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

This makes sense. We can probably split this into multiple bugs:

• the first one to automatically connect
• another one to have the start profiling button directly
• and others? for example being able to load the about:debugging toolbox across reload for targets with stable ids like webextensions