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1. Colby Russell (colby@kosmos.social)'s status on Friday, 03-Mar-2023 09:19:18 JST Colby Russell

   It boggles my mind that I seem to be the only one annoyed by the modal interaction style that modern browser devtools inherited from Firebug.

   I see people constantly talk about how they can't imagine working without multiple displays because it affords the ability to put so much on the screen at once. So they say. Meanwhile, I do everything on a ~13 laptop screen. But I'm the one who has to point out how crazy it is that you can't inspect the style rules of two elements at the same time?

   • Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Friday, 03-Mar-2023 09:19:10 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     @colby I think my "Amphiarao" webpage debugger has accidentally solved your gripe: Right-click -> "Open in new tab".

   • Colby Russell (colby@kosmos.social)'s status on Friday, 03-Mar-2023 09:19:14 JST Colby Russell

     in reply to

     This wasn't a problem in Joe Hewitt's original DOM Inspector. You could right click any object (e.g. DOM node) and bring up a new inspector window for that object. You could do the same for another object, and another. You could have multiple "viewers" trained on a single object.

     Then Joe made Firebug and gave it a modal UI, and literally every browser has copied that same basic design error. Exasperating!

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Friday, 03-Mar-2023 09:28:36 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     @colby Code: https://git.argonaut-constellation.org/~alcinnz/amphiarao

     (bad) homepage: http://rhapsode-web.org/amphiarao

   • Colby Russell (colby@kosmos.social)'s status on Friday, 03-Mar-2023 09:28:37 JST Colby Russell

     in reply to

     • Adrian Cochrane

     @alcinnz <https://argonaut-constellation.org/amphiarao>

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Friday, 03-Mar-2023 09:29:29 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     @colby Blogpost: https://argonaut-constellation.org/2021/12/23/amphiarao.html

   • Colby Russell (colby@kosmos.social)'s status on Friday, 03-Mar-2023 09:54:39 JST Colby Russell

     in reply to

     Honorable mention: #GlamorousToolkit, which is not a browser development toolset, but it gets the basic idea right for its domain. It uses Miller columns to let you drill down in an object graph and switch between multiple viewers—plus create your custom viewers on-the-fly.

     Every debugger should ship with this kind of tightly integrated inspector framework to let probe whatever you want that's in scope like this when stopped at a breakpoint.

     <https://gtoolkit.com/>

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Colby Russell (colby@kosmos.social)'s status on Friday, 03-Mar-2023 09:54:53 JST Colby Russell

     in reply to

     If Firefox jettisoned its devtools in favor of GToolkit integrated in the browser, that would be a tremendous boon not just to Web development, but computing generally.