Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

I haven't been following Firefox all that closely. Is the debugger API they're developing interoperable with Chrome's? It seems like it would be good for the web to decouple developer tools from browser engines. If I could run Firebug on Chrome or Blink's Dev Tools on Firefox, I'd only have to learn one set of tools to be able to effectively create cross-browser projects.

(If you substitute the native dev tools in this thought experiment with Brackets or Sublime Web Inspector, you start to see the power of decoupling tooling from the browser.)

View on HN

(I'm a member of the Firefox Developer Tools team)

Our RDP (Remote Debugging Protocol) is not interoperable with the one in Chrome or any other browser. There are two reasons:

1) Both us and Chrome team would like to iterate on our protocols and tools as fast as we can. Maybe in future, when tools across browsers stabilize there will be a case for a standard but I personally believe that a wrapper protocol is a better answer.

2) RDPs depend on their platform's architecture. Ours is very SpiderMonkey centric while Chrome's is all about V8.

Google organized a nice Summit during the I/O this year and I attended on behalf of our team (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOO9Kb1-JJU). I shared my thoughts on interoperability and other issues here: https://medium.com/web-developer-tools/1060a9f69e6a

Hope that helps.

I have no idea, but I doubt it. Although, yes, it should really be standardized though, like the JVM debug protocol.

The Google Web Toolkit team was looking at this; instead of their historical approach of using a JVM to run/debug user code (because that was actually a really great idea in IE6), using the native JS debuggers in FF/Chrome/etc.

...except that there is all sorts of wonkiness, like only 1 debugger is supported at a time, so you can't use, say, Eclipse (whether for GWT or pure JS debugging) + FF dev tools for inspecting CSS/etc. at the same time. And you can only connect to 1 tab...something, something. I was not directly involved, but it didn't sound pleasant.

Anyway, I totally agree that native dev tools should be decoupled/play friendly with other tools.

AFAICT, so far the FF/Chrome engineers are going down the path of basically building IDEs from scratch, in the browser itself.

Which was great for Firebug, and inspecting elements, but for a debugger, I really want to stay in my IDE.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com