‘Stymied From Experimentation’ – Firefox ‘View Page Source’
Firefox’s – ‘View Source’ component sucks. It must improve.
Upon reading the WebMonkey article, “After Five Years on the Web Firefox Preps for the Next Round“, I was reminded of a suppressed annoyance, or ‘beef’ I have with Firefox through reading Jonathan Nightengale’s statement.
“When a developer loses the ability to view a web page’s source code (something you can’t easily do in Flash) they can’t see how web applications and complex interactions function. And, he says, that stymies further experimentation”
Jonathan is absolutely correct. Developers need the ability to learn from each other and the only best way to do this is through viewing a web page’s source code. View Page Source is a door to undiscovered knowledge on the web.
Ah yes, ‘View Page Source’.
See, in order to boast and fully support this idea, I believe that developers need to have access to the best tools available. Developers need to harness these tools and utilize them to their fullest potential. These tools should exhibit engaging yet intuitive functionality and rewarding characteristics.
See, my ‘beef’ is with Firefox’s ‘View Page Source’. It sucks. It’s really bad. It’s archaic. In-fact, here are 200 bugs spanning multiple years pertaining to the simple view-source component in Firefox.
Here’s my personal listing of ideas to improve View Source with 5 improvements:
- Introduce proper syntax highlighting (crucially needed with the new HTML5 parser)
- Links should have copy link location in the context menu
- Line numbers should appear in a side column
- Add view-selection-source ability
- Interface should be tabbed!
With many of those 200 (simple query search of ‘View Source’) filed as enhancements, it’s clear that the view-source component needs a complete overhaul.
I believe that Firefox needs to revamp it’s view-source component in order to supply developers with the best tools necessary to prevent a case of being stymied from experimentation and any other further barriers of innovation on the web.
Developers need the best tools out there, and I feel that they are left out of what could be an awesomely improved component and uniquely defined characteristic of the entire Firefox experience.
Currently, I dont think there is a significant drive towards prioritizing this component in the browser. In fact, I dont think it has been touched in many years. It certainly feels archaic, sluggish and lacking. Has the code been touched in years?
So I ask the community, you reading this, do you wish to collaborate to revitalize this dying dead horse?
What do you think?
I tend to just use Firebug’s inspect functionality nowadays if I’m interested in the markup and CSS of a specific element. The fact that you can also hover over the markup and see the element highlighted is very useful.
ScrapBook’s functionality to be able to delete elements from the page using point and click (the DOM eraser) is also very handy, but you have to save the page in your ScrapBook first before being able to do so.
Perhaps it would be useful if the View Source functionality went from read-only to being an actual editor (with the changes being made immediately being visible in the document being edited).[1] Supporting the before mentioned features from Firebug and the DOM Eraser from ScrapBook.
These are just some ideas I’m throwing around, they may or may not be of any use. :-)
References:
[1] The Web Developer Extension has similar functionality under “Edit HTML”, but it is very rudimentary (and the editor is just a textarea with no syntax highlighting or anything).