936516 - Hovering over HTML in inspector should highlight location in document, not just upon click of HTML in inspector.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(DevTools :: Inspector, enhancement)

Description

[Dane MacMillan [:danemacmillan]]

When hovering over HTML elements in the inspector, the document should immediately highlight the areas that are being hovered over in the HTML. Currently, to view the highlighted area, the HTML in the inspector must be clicked. Firebug currently does this. 

As a bonus, perhaps the document should scroll the highlight into view when not in view, and a click on the HTML element in inspector would lock the scroll until the mouse is hovered over the document (leaves inspector code), so that mousing over the HTML in the inspector won't retrigger the live highlighting and scroll. 


In addition, and this might fit better in another bug report, but after selecting an element in the HTML inspector, the area in the document is highlighted (dashed borders), with the tooltip positioned above or below the highlight, which is the standard behavior. The problem is when trying to get rid of it; there's no convenient way to do so, and most workflows won't require this tooltip and highlight to persist. The only way to get rid of it is to either select another element in the inspector, or close the Developer Tools. There should either be an option in the settings to disable the persistent tooltip and highlight, or an easy way to close it from within the document. For comparison, Firebug doesn't persist the highlight at all, nor provide a tooltip for the highlighted area.

Comment 1

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Dane, I went ahead and marked this NEW and as an enhancement request. 
Would you like to report the other issue in a separate bug? Thanks!

Comment 2

[Dane MacMillan [:danemacmillan]]

Hey, thanks!

Since posting the report, two of the three points have been addressed in later releases. These are the two that are now fixed:


Fixed:
> When hovering over HTML elements in the inspector, the document should immediately highlight the areas that are being hovered over in the HTML


Fixed:
> The problem is when trying to get rid of it [the dashed boarder and tooltip]; there's no convenient way to do so, and most workflows won't require this tooltip and highlight to persist.

The third point that I made has not, and I'll definitely make a bug report for it. I'll link to it here, and I think it would be safe to mark this report as "Resolved."

Comment 3

[Dane MacMillan [:danemacmillan]]

My third point about scrolling the corresponding document section into view was made as a comment to an existing, related bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=892562#c5

Comment 4

[Dane MacMillan [:danemacmillan]]

That one was closed as well, and it was suggested I create another bug. Here it is, for reference: bug 971674.