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Comment by mbrookes | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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