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Firefox 15 Coming With Souped-Up, Faster Debugger

Posted by Unknown on from the catching-up-with-the-lisp-machine dept.

StormDriver writes "Firefox 15 has hit the Mozilla pre-beta Aurora channel, and it features a redesigned, built-in debugger." The original weblog post has more. Thanks to improved debugger internals in SpiderMonkey, supposedly code should run just as fast with debugging enabled as without (ever try loading Slashdot with firebug accidentally enabled?). There are also new tools for testing mobile layouts from the comfort of your workstation, and the debugger can attach to remote processes (Something Emacs users have enjoyed for years now, albeit in a hackish manner and without support for mobile Firefox).

5 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. ever try loading Slashdot without firebug enabled? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Honestly, "Web 2.0" transforms so much otherwise perfectly functional hardware into environmentally-unfriendly junk that you might as well just stick your dick in an endangered species.

    The web ten years ago was fine: people programmed for content and efficiency. Why can't we stay that way, with the advancement being in quality and quantity of /content/?

  2. Oh shut up already. by nashv · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can all these noobish people with their issue with version numbers get over it? Every Slashdot post has these idiots cribbing.

    You can disable automatic updates. Why are you whining? You don't like something called 15? Write a Greasemonkey script to display the correct version number however you want.

    All version numbers as supposed to say is which distribution came first and which came later. 15 > 14. That is all you need to know from a version number.

    --
    Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
    1. Re:Oh shut up already. by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > All version numbers as supposed to say is which distribution came first and which came later.

      Actually, you're missing the point. I can tell you have never had to support an existing corporate infrastructure that just can not upgrade to the "latest bleeding edge" because they don't have the resources to test everything possible code path to tell what broke, what works, etc.

      The current numbering schema in FF is a "revision" number. Originally Version numbers conveyed EXTRA information. It lets users know about compatibility / bugs because it denotes which branch the code is in. Let's give a practical example using a fictional language 'Gem'.

      If I'm working with Gem v5.x I can (reasonably) expect those features (and bugs) to be relatively consistent no matter if I'm with 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, etc. If I switch to Gem 6.x the developer may have switched to a completely different (source control code) branch which may also be a completely different implementation. As an user, I may not like it, but I can stick with the old (stable) version until the new version gets the kinks worked out AND when I have the time and resources to properly test the new version before deploying it.

      If the developer instead has used a relative numbering schema, aka, revisions, like
      * rev 4
      * rev 5
      * rev 6
      * rev 7
      * rev 8
      * rev 9
      * rev 10

      How do I *easily* tell when

      a) features were added? and,
      b) features deprecated? and
      c) features removed?

      Yes, you still can tell this with a relative revision number but it is easier to manage the complexity with the traditional hybrid version.revision numbers.

      The Mozilla team switching their focus to hyper-inflate their version number because they are trying to play some marketing game with Chrome tells me that they are no longer focused on building a great product -- their priorities are all fucked up. i.e. How many more versions do we have to go before they _finally_ fix the dam memory leak??

  3. Re:bloated RAM usage by Cyko_01 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes they did. There was a benchmark story in slasdot a little while ago. It is as good as or better then chrome

  4. Re:Debugging Is the Next Frontier in Faster Browsi by hackertourist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From my (totally unscientific) observation, most of the page load time is due to every page requesting crap from 10 different ad networks and trackers, which are inevitably overloaded. You can optimize the pages you serve all you want, but this may be a case where developers need to adjust the attitude of the commercial people involved instead.