A few months back the Mozilla Foundation released a new version of their browser called Firefox Developer Edition (FDE). While I’m typically a Chrome/Safari kind of guy, I decided to give the new tool a whirl and you know what? I’m rather impressed with it. I haven’t dug into all of its features, but I’m using it more and more and here’s why.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a screenshot of the browser in action (click on it to get a larger version). Here are all the things that have struck me so far.
- Dark Theme - It sounds petty, but with all the coding I do, I’ve adopted a dark editor theme for all of my coding environments due to the reduced eye fatigue is has been known to provide.
- First Class Access to Tools - In Chrome and other browsers, it is a couple of clicks to get specifically to the Javascript Debugger, or the Style Editor. With FDE, you click the wrench (the first icon available after the address bar) and all the tools available are right there. Select and go!
- Additional Tools - Need to grab the color of that page or shading on your image. Don’t go hunting for an extra extension or file up an additional tool, there’s one built in. Need to test a little more than a single line of Javascript, but not rewrite and entire module, there’s a scratchpad for that.
- Speed - Everything seems to load faster through FDE. I’m not exactly sure why. I have about the same amount of plugins enabled as other browsers and from what I’ve seen this is a full fledged Firefox browser, so nothing is left out that way. When things load faster, I can debug faster, and that’s always helpful.
There are still a few drawbacks to FDE (anonymous functions do not seem to be debuggable currently) but overall I’ve been one happy [insert clever and popular nomenclature for coder here] since using it and I’ll probably be sticking with it for a while.
Grab your copy here and let me know if you stumble across any other cool tricks with FDE.