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Comment by eriknstr | Hacker News Reader

>removing dev tools

Hold your horses! The introduction of dev tools was one of the best things to happen to browsers. Removing them would take away opportunity from a lot of people in learning web development, and would also lead to websites having more bugs.

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My mom doesn't need dev tools preinstalled in her browser. Though I doubt removing them would make the browser faster/leaner.

Is there something particular about your mom I should take away here? Or moms in general? Or women? Or older people?

My mom, like yours, would have no use for dev tools -- because she's just not interested. And neither would my brother, but my grandma would have loved learning about this stuff if she had lived long enough, and my kids have discovered this "secret hacker mode" all on their own and are delighted.

Chill out. My mom is the most common non-technical person I deal with. No need or reason to assume sexism, ageism, motherism, or any other isms. The only take away from my comment should have been "Hey, non technical people don't need developer extensions".

Yeah, but you will need it when your mom calls you asking for help with some broken website she is trying to use :)

Really? Do you commonly debug random websites for your mom?

Yes, I do that more often than not. Specially during that time of the year when you need to do the tax declaration and use the utterly broken government websites. One common problem that I have to fix is that the Brazilian government likes to issue their own SSL certificates which are not accepted by any browser, therefore I keep the requests tab open and look for any Ajax requests that was blocked due to SSL errors.

You can hardly see source in Chrome without the dev tools. The Ctrl+U "functionality" just generates huge HTML document (a table filled with spans to highlight syntax) and it is very slow on large websites (both generating it and rendering I'd assume).

The CTRL-U is just the HTML part of the page. Not the CSS, images, or the other stuff.

Source HTML even, so whatever javascript changed is not there.

But for fun and laughs I saved js-generated source of a pretty big web page, opened it, and then pressed CTRL-U. It took 50 seconds to generate and render the source view. No wonder...

> document.getElementsByTagName('*').length

< 956632

(should be fun to go deeper and save this html, and then go ctrl+u on that)

edit: Tried it and it's been choking on the next "level" for the past 9 minutes. The tab is at over 1.5GB memory, I'm going to kill it.

I'm using Chrome and pressed Ctrl-U. Nothing happened. What was supposed to happen?

Usually, a new tab opens whose address is "view-source:$URL_OF_PREV_PAGE". Obviously, it's not terribly hard to replicate by hand, but that's weird. As has been said since the days of old, "it worked on my machine".

That's nothing to do with Chrome though, that's how the HTML is.

But the idea to generate that huge HTML by javascript to display source is weird. Especially when it takes half a minute for a big web page.

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