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Comment by gcb0 | Hacker News Reader

this should have been an extension... seems too specialized to a technic I hope will not endure the test of time.

You could just as easily say all dev tools should be omitted from all browsers and made available as extensions instead.

You hope web designers won't take to using CSS Grid? Do you think sticking with hacks like floats is better?

Use Flexbox. CSS Grid doesn't solve anything you can't already do with Flexbox. They're both optimized for user interface design.

This is categorically false. CSS Grid and Flexbox do have overlap, but Grid complements Flexbox, and the two together get a LOT closer to the "holy grail" of purely semantic markup then either alone.

That, in turn, has real benefits: the less "styling" nonsense is baked into your markup, the more powerful the ability to use CSS media queries and other tools to transform the presentation based on device and other contextual information (e.g. different embedding of the same content)

FWIW, I've shipped "grid in Flexbox" sites. Flexbox was better than the-bad-old-days, but still kinda sucked, simply because of the hacks needed to make Flexbox approach grid layout.

Here are a couple of articles that should help explain when CSS Grid would be a better choice than Flexbox.

https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/03/30/should-i-use-...

https://css-tricks.com/css-grid-replace-flexbox/

BTW, Microsoft Edge has the current CSS Grid syntax available behind a feature flag (available in Windows 10 Insider Preview build 16226).

https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-dev...

The entire CSS Working Group just facepalmed.

Many css grids are todays actually made with flexbox. Bootstrap 4 does that.

But this tool is actually about the "grid" property, which is a nice tool to do grids natively.

The purpose of Firefox Developer Tools is to make debugging web pages easier for web developers. It’s not meant to be used by regular users. Inspecting elements and their applied styles is an integral part of web development, and this just makes it easier to debug grid layouts.

> It’s not meant to be used by regular users.

That, I believe, was the foundation of @gbc0's point.

And on that basis I'm inclined to agree - why download, install and run for every user a set of tools that could as easily be installed the first time they are accessed?

Because while it's not for every "regular user", it's a tinkering tool which allows some "regular users" to start diving into the guts of the machine, get better insight and possibly decide to make it their life's work, in much the same way many of us got started because we had machines which let us peek and prod "under the cover" so to speak.

Yes. "View source" being in pretty much every browser from the beginning has been an important part of the democratizing nature of the web. As web sites and development have gotten more complex, have dev tools baked into most browsers and continually adding capability helps reduce the barrier to entry.

I appreciate that Firefox has chosen to differentiate their dev tools from others by adding a tool like this. Google Chrome dev tools seem to be more focused on performance testing. It wouldn't be a bad thing if one set of dev tools was better for performance and JavaScript debugging and other was better for solving visual design problems.

Indeed. Expressiveness has not been a big focus in the past. We'd like to change that with Firefox. What kinds of tools would you like to see for solving visual design problems?

Sure, since these features are just written in HTML and JS (the modern Firefox devtools use HTML, not XUL), they could certainly be downloaded on demand. The added complexity of that combined with the relatively small size of the code that implements the the UI means that there's not much reason to do so. And it's only the UI that could be downloaded on demand; it'd be pretty hard to break the JS engine in half to put breakpoints into an extension, or to ruin the layout engine so that you need an extension use the CSSOM.

Having the dev tools integrated means that they are still available if you're using some machine (e.g. a school PC) where you cannot install extensions.

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