Okay, let's start fresh and try this again. Long time user, 2nd post. Looking through the newsgroup, I see several people trying to articulate this point and explain why it's such a significant problem, without success on the receiving end. I don't know if I'll be more successful, but I'll be trying to be very concrete, logical, and step- by-step.
Core problem description: conflation of UI visibility with activation I'll be trying to explain: 1. what this is 2. that this is different from previous Firebugs 3. why the conflation is a bad thing 4. why the way the change was implemented is a bad thing Scenario A: 1. Ctrl-F12, "Open Firebug in New Window" 2. See a greyed-out window with a button in the middle saying "Activate Firebug for the selected Firefox tab" 3. Think "ok, I will activate Firebug so that it will be 'on' and I can debug this web page" 4. Click the Activate button. 5. Discover that a page refresh is needed, and refresh the web page. 6. Use Firebug to investigate an issue in the web page 7. Be finished with Firebug for the moment, but want to continue working with the web page 8. Use i) Ctrl-W, ii) File->Close, iii) the red "X", or iv) "Open Firebug in New Window" to close the Firebug window. 9. User now thinks Firebug window is closed, but that Firebug is still running (like all previous versions) on this web page. 10. Repeat step 1. Expected: To be in the same state as the beginning of step 8 Actual: The user is at state 5 Expected: That the console log and net tab have been operating between steps 9 and 10 Actual: Firebug has been "suspended" during that time, so any issues have to be recreated Scenario A illustrates how two functions which were heretofore distinct: 1. The "on-ness" or activation of Firebug 2. The visibility of the user interface of Firebug have been merged, or conflated, into one single thing, where "thing" means both representation in the Firebug interface and action taken by the user. This conflation leads to these perceived problems: Expected: Hiding the Firebug UI does not turn it off for my web page Actual: Hiding the Firebug UI turned off console logging, script breakpoints, net logging Expected: I turned Firebug on for this site, it should always be running Actual: Firebug gets turned off unintentionally - the user meant to *hide* Firebug, but they also *deactivated* it because those two actions are conflated. Expected: There is a way to have Firebug hidden but running, like all previous versions Actual: There is NO way to close the Firebug external window without deactivating Firebug for that web page. These are all different ways of attempting to express the effect of this conflation. Now, do I need to explain how this is different from previous Firebug versions? In previous versions, once I got things turned on for my whitelist of sites (which, for me personally is just "localhost" most of the time), I never had to worry about it again. I don't think there *was* any "suspension" of Firebug previously. The existence of a suspension/deactivation feature is not itself a bad thing. However, by tying it inextricably to the visibility of the Firebug UI, users are forced to do both things when they only want to do one. The way this change was made really brought about confusion, by *not changing anything visible*. The menu still says "Open Firebug", not "Activate Firebug". The Firebug File menu still says "Close", not "Deactivate". This is guaranteed to confuse all the users who are migrating to Firefox 3.5 and are trying to deduce why/how Firebug changed its behavior. (The no-auto-refresh change, while a good change once a toggle/preference gets implemented, is another confounding variable to figure out.) Here are a few more problems with external window mode that are inconsistencies with even the new conflated model: (These are NOT the main issue here, they serve just to further illustrate how the semantics of UI visibility are subtly different for in-page mode and external window mode, further illustrating how the central conflation fails to work usefully and understandably.) Expected: "minimize" works the same for all modes of Firebug Actual: in-page Firebug is hidden completely by minimize, while the external window stays around in the Windows taskbar. Expected: if the Firebug UI insists on being visible when active and hidden when deactivated, then the external window should hide itself for non-active tabs Actual: the Firebug external window remains open (but greyed out) when the user switches to a non-active tab Expected: external window mode v. in-page mode will be remembered Actual: if a user uses the "switch to non-active page, then close external window, then come back to active page" trick, the Firebug UI comes back inside the page rather than as an external window I develop a web application that has server-rendered components that are sensitive to page size. Having Firebug pop up inside the browser makes my page size smaller, which causes Bad Things (tm) to happen with respect to debugging ability. This is why I always use the external window mode of Firebug, and thus why the conflation of UI visibility with activation hits me - and all external-mode Firebug users - even harder than most. Are we now close to clear on the nature of this problem? Again, love the tool and am here because I care. Thanks. -James --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Firebug" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/firebug?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
