924670 - Allow web development tools to inspect other browsers

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

This may be a bit of a pipe dream, but bear with me.

Currently, devtools for web developers are integrated into the browsers. When you're testing in Chrome, you have to use the chrome dev tools, when in IE, you are stuck with IEs (admittedly improving) devtools, etc.

Ideally, I would be able to use one set of devtools across any browser. This seems impossible, but we have something like this in being able to remotely inspect Firefox OS / Firefox for Android with the desktop browser webtools. Chrome can do the same with chrome on Android, and Safari with Mobile Safari on iOS. Each major browser has their own protocol to talk to their mobile equivalent. If these could ever be standardized, it could be possible to use one set of devtools to inspect Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE, etc. (desktop or mobile).

As a web developent who has to rewire my brain every time I swich browsers for testing, this would be a gift.

Credit/blame to :rik, who brought up the current mobile inspection protocols when I asked about this at the 2013 Summit in Toronto.

Comment 1

[Joe Walker [:jwalker]]

This is something that we've thought about and been asked about many times. The TL;DR is "maybe one day, but it would be the wrong priority right now".

There are several reasons it's hard:
* This isn't just about debugging. It's easy to think "OK so we need an API for manipulating breakpoints, how hard can that be", but this is about remoting a cross-platform API to all our tools
* There are some fairly deep problems with aligning the protocols. You don't get to just transform the packets on the way past; When you're providing a asynchronous interface to a changing DOM you have to deal with tricky things like element lifetime (I'm inspecting X, but it just got removed from the DOM, etc)
* The set of features provided by each tool is different so until we agree on the complete set of required features, it's always going to be an incomplete job