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console.log({ myVariable });
19.11.2020
I think this might be my most popular tweet of all time, but I’m not sure how to verify that these days. I’ll restate this neat little trick here because blogging is cool and fun.
I used to do this a lot while debugging JavaScript:
console.log("myVariable: ", myVariable);
But now I...
Core Web Vital Tooling
26.10.2020
I still think the Google-devised Core Web Vitals are smart. When I first got into caring about performance, it was all: reduce requests! cache things! Make stuff smaller! And while those are all very related to web performance, they are abstractly related. Actual web performance to users are things...
Make Your Own Dev Tool
29.9.2020
Amber Wilson on making bookmarklets to help yo-self. She shows off one that injects an accessibility script — I like this approach, as it means you don’t have to maintain the bookmarklet, just the script it links to). Another example runs some code contained right in the link. The result...
Comparing Browsers for Responsive Design
1.9.2020
There are a number of these desktop apps where the goal is showing your site at different dimensions all at the same time. So you can, for example, be writing CSS and making sure it’s working across all the viewports in a single glance.
They are all very similar. For example, they...
What’s New In DevTools (Chrome 86)
26.8.2020
It wasn’t that long ago that Umar Hansa published a look at the most interesting new features in Chrome DevTools released in 2020. In fact, it was just earlier this month!
But in that short amount of time, Chrome has a few new tricks up its sleeve. One of the features Umar covered was...
Computed Values: More Than Meets the Eye
5.8.2020
Browser DevTools are indispensable for us front end developers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the Computed tab, a small corner of the DevTools panel that shows us big things, like how relative CSS values are resolved. We’ll also see how inheritance fits into the browser’s...
A Look at What’s New in Chrome DevTools in 2020
31.7.2020
I’m excited to share some of the newer features in Chrome DevTools with you. There’s a brief introduction below, and then we’ll cover many of the new DevTools features. We’ll also look at what’s happening in some other browsers. I keep up with this stuff, as I create Dev Tips, the largest...
New in Chrome: CSS Overview
1.7.2020
Here’s a fancy new experimental feature in Chrome! Now, we can get an overview of the CSS used on a site, from how many colors there are to the number of unused declarations… even down to the total number of defined media queries.
Again, this is an experimental feature. Not only does that...
Understand why CSS has no effect with the Inactive CSS rules indicator in Firefox DevTools
5.6.2020
It’s useful when DevTools tells you that a declaration is invalid. For example, colr: red; isn’t valid because colr isn’t a valid property. Likewise color: rd; isn’t valid because rd isn’t a valid value. For the most part, a browser’s DevTools shows...
Core Web Vitals
29.5.2020
Core Web Vitals is what Google is calling a a new collection of three web performance metrics:
LCP: Largest Contentful Paint
FID: First Input Delay
CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift
These are all measurable. They aren’t in Lighthouse (e.g. the Audits tab in Chrome DevTools) just yet, but sounds...
CSS Tips for New Devs
27.5.2020
Amber Wilson has some CSS Tips for New Devs, like:
It’s not a good idea to fix shortcomings in your HTML with CSS. Fix your HTML first!
And…
You can change CSS right in your browser’s DevTools (to open them, right-click the browser window and choose “inspect”...
Offscreen Text for Copy & Paste
15.5.2020
The relationship between HTML and CSS is special: mixing content via HTML with presentation from CSS to make an awesome presentation. Sometimes, however, you need to employ CSS tricks solely to enhance functionality. This could be one of those cases. When browsing through the Firefox DevTools...
Exciting Things on the Horizon For CSS Layout
8.5.2020
Michelle Barker notes that it’s been a heck of a week for us CSS layout nerds.
Firefox has long had the best DevTools for CSS Grid, but Chrome is about to catch up and go one bit better by visualizing grid line numbers and names.
Firefox supports gap for display: flex, which is great,...
How to Create a “Skip to Content” Link
17.3.2020
Skip links are little internal navigation links that help users move around a page. It’s possible you’ve never actually seen one before because they’re often hidden from view and used as an accessibility enhancement that lets keyboard users and screen readers jump from the top of the page to...
Lazy Object Initialization
17.2.2020
The Firefox DevTools underlying code, which is written with JavaScript and HTML, is a complex application. Due to the complexity and amount of work going on, the DevTools team has done everything they can to load as little as possible. Furthermore the team has a system of lazily importing...
“resize: none;” on textareas is bad UX
30.1.2020
Catalin Rosu:
Sometimes you need to type a long reply that consists of many paragraphs and wrapping that text within a tiny textarea box makes it hard to understand and to follow as you type. There were many times when I had to write that text within Notepad++ for example and then just paste...
WhoCanUse
4.12.2019
There are loads of microsites and developer tools for looking at color accessibility, including tools built right into browser DevTools. They often show you if a color passes AA or AAA WCAG guidelines. But color contrast is more complicated than that because there is a wide variety of vision...
Hello Fenix!
11.11.2019
Over seven years ago I made the massive career leap to Mozilla. Two years ago I realized a dream of joining the Firefox DevTools team — it’s been a rewarding adventure helping to improve the Firefox DevTools Debugger and other super helpful tools. I’m frightened, excited,...
JavaScript waitForTime
6.11.2019
I write a lot of tests for new features within Firefox DevTools. We have hundreds of “mochitests” which open the browser and perform synthetic actions like clicking, typing, and other user actions. I’ve previously written about waitForever which essentially halts following actions...
Confessions of a Web Developer XVII
24.9.2019
It’s been quite a while since I’ve gotten a few things off of my chest and since I’m always full of peeves and annoyances I thought it was time to unleash: Firefox’s DevTools are outstanding right now. From the improvements we’ve made to the debugger, to responsive...