Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?
In terms of devtools, here is my feedback/proposals:- the scratchpad is great but not usable enough. I would go somewhat in the same direction as firebug when you have the js command line in multi-line mode. The problems I see with the scratchpad is that it's yet another window to open and drag around and executing the code and getting the result aren't very easy things to do (ctrl+enter would be great).- of course, a very popular request is a better integration between the devtools and the IDE, and I think the fact that the debugger can be remotely accessed is great cause it will help immensely in this topic, however, I was thinking that perhaps, one simple thing that could help would be a way to drive the web page UI elements from the devtools, with some kind of selenium-like script. The goal would be to easily reach a certain point of the app when repeatedly debugging/developing that particular part. Today, a webdev's workflow is mostly write in IDE -> F5 in browser -> click around -> debug/verify -> back to IDE -> etc ..
So the goal would be to speed up the "click around" part, and I was thinking that firefox/devtools could expose something simple to easily script that part.- another thing I'd enjoy as a webdev is a way to mock/filter http requests and responses from the Net tab (currently being developed). Indeed, when working on a web app, there are chances that the server-side code won't be ready at the same time as the client-side code. Another use case is when debugging and trying to find a fix for a problem in a remote platform (in production for instance). The idea would be to let developers specify, for a given request, a static file on disk to respond with instead of actually going to the server to get the true response. This way you could inject a new version of a file for testing, or you could mock a server response to work on the javascript part before the server-side is ready.Hope this helps.