Future of Firefox dev tools revealed

Amid industry debate about the pros and cons of designing in the browser, Mozilla has revealed the future of Firefox’s developer tools.

On his blog, Mozilla technology evangelist Paul Rouget said he’s asked on a number of developer channels about the sort of tools that web developers would like to see integrated into Firefox. Plenty of answers later, the Firefox team set about organising and prioritising the results, and then “hacking on these different requests”.

The new and amended tools previewed are at various stages of development, and range from superior workflows through to improved integration with other tools. For example, a Python library is being built that editors can use to integrate with Firefox. The team has also mocked up how it may be possible to write code directly from the browser.

A new network panel and timeline is in the works while Firefox Nightly already has dev tools that can be docked on the right-hand side of the browser.

Other possible changes to Firefox's developer tools in the future may include a better experience for Firebug users, support for SourceMap, a CSS transitions/animation debugging tool as well as visualisers for event bindings, offline storage tools and pseudo elements inspection.

Rouget added that he’d welcome further comments, ideas and feedback via the post or his Twitter account, @paulrouget.