Jun 22, 2011

Wow! Firefox inspector hits and misses

I don't like FireBug. You know, the 3rd party utility that gives Firefox a DOM inspector that's somewhere between how bad IE 8's is, and how great the Chrome one is. It will let you edit CSS and HTML live, in the browser, and let you copy your changes so you can paste them back into your code. But it's like it doesn't really want to do those things for you. Chrome's inspector really does want you to do it. Taking my fiddling around into the inspector has cut my development time quite a bit, so I'm totally going to use whichever inspector makes it easiest.

I mean, thank goodness it's there so I can debug stuff in Firefox, but thank goodness Chrome's is better, so I don't have to do my CSS design with it. Whew.

This Firefox DOM inspector is even worse than FireBug, though. Try to select that CSS? No, don't try. Don't bother. Just use it to see why it looks like shit in Firefox, try your thing out, and then copy and paste the value. Don't try to copy and paste the whole declaration. Don't try to bring the value with it. Just write "font-size: ;" then hit the arrow-key back to the left of that semicolon, paste your thing, and thank your lucky stars you don't have to use Firebug every single time you're curious about some CSS.