I can't seem to make the switch away from Chromium devtools. I don't know whether it's because I am habituated to the Chromium ones or whether there is something klunky about the Firefox devtools that I can't put my finger on.
As others have pointed out, it may be worth looking into whether or not your reasons for using Chromium for the devtools are simply habit.
Speaking for myself, I'm in the other camp. I never really ditched Firefox for Chrome except for a brief period[0]. I returned to Firefox back when it was still called "Firefox (Not Responding)". Other than the renaming (/s), it -- generally -- flies. The devtools do what I need them to do, however, I used to hop back and forth from Chromium to FF a lot more.
So I'll be re-evaluating things, again, myself -- just in the other direction. :)
[0] I used Chrome for about two years after its release because Firefox wouldn't work with an internal application. It was just easier to use a single browser.
I tried for the last several weeks to switch to Firefox ("normal" edition) after Google introduced new mechanics pushing account login, but ultimately, and disappointingly, found myself drifting back to Chrome.
Main reasons were speed (Firefox opened slightly slower, and there seemed to feel like subtly more per-character latency typing in URL's) and minor anti-native behavior (the default-disabled-until-you-move-your-mouse Save button was particularly annoying, even though I understand the rationale).
I got the dreaded "Firefox process is already running" dialog a few times and had to close all my windows (ugh). I really missed Session Buddy; tried alternatives like Tree Style Tab but they weren't as clean.
Finally, one or two pages didn't render / operate properly (guessing due to non-cross-compatible JavaScript statement buried somewhere in them).
Unfortunately I don't have the time to create good step-by-step reproducibles and log bugs. I know some of this can be tweaked out via preference settings. I even spent some time tailoring my userChrome.css per suggestions here. But just couldn't get everything to work quite perfect. FF will have to spend some more time as my secondary browser, may give it a shot again in another year or so or next time Google pedals something stupid. Will try out the new devtools when I'm working on a page, maybe that'll be the hook for another attempt.
>it may be worth looking into whether or not your reasons for using Chromium for the devtools are simply habit
After deciding that life's too short and that I really should give it a try - I've found out that source maps doesn't work on Firefox's dev tools.
Back to chrome.
Each has their pros and cons. My favorite features in FF devtools which are missing from Chrome are CSS diff and the advanced filtering in the network panel. Chrome filtering only works on hosts, while FF can filter in query strings and other sections of a request.
I often use network filtering in Chrome devtools to find requests by query string. If you start typing into the search box it matches it against the whole request including url parameters.
Having recently switched to Edge Dev after having used Firefox for roughly a year (and Chrome before that), I'd say Firefox devtools' strongest point are the style editing stuff.
Somehow Firefox devtools feel a bit clunkier when working on JS projects but they offer a lot of neat gimmicks if you dig into the depths of CSS. I also find the guidelines when highlighting an element more helpful than in Chromium for aligning elements on the page.
Personally I don't get to use grid layouts as my code has to work in IE11 (I gave autoprefixer a try but in the end it was no significant improvement over flexbox because of all the caveats and limitations). If you do, I'd imagine Firefox devtools would be a gamechanger for you.
I find myself occasionally switching back to Firefox for CSS work, then going back to Edge Dev for everything else.
I have the same problem in the opposite directions: the interface of Chromium developer console is unfriendly to me, I never manage to get comfortable with it...
Other than the web socket support in Chrome, the FF dev tools are a billion times better than Chrome now. I cannot work without the css layout overlays from FF dev tools. Makes working with grid layouts insanely easy.
The Chrome profiler is a lot better (IMO) than the one Firefox ships. But then there is https://profiler.firefox.com/
The debugger/sources view in Firefox also seems buggier still. E.g. a lot of times while it correctly displays source-mapped locations in the console, clicking on those source links will not actually go to the right place in the source view (it will either end up in the packed source or it will not go to the correct line in the source-mapped file even tho the console link gave the correct line).
One thing I miss that Firefox does not have at all is the Layers view. Which would be especially important since such things are browser specific and debugging performance/memory issues and making sure the engine uses a sane set of compositing layers can be important sometimes.
But the feature I miss most in my tiny corner of the world by a large margin is the Websocket support indeed. This is the thing that always makes me go back to Chrome devtools.
While I mostly agree, I do switch to Chrome every once in a while when the javascript stacktrace in FFdev is a bit unclear. Chrome usually seems to be a bit better. But I always switch right back to FF.
I tried FF dev edition with Angular, it was getting randomly slow. Weird issues popping while debuging typescript code. In the end I have to use Chrome for my work, even though I would like to drop Chrome personaly. That said, I sometimes have to debug Angular applications on IE11 which is worst nightmare...
I had similar experiences with a Vuejs application where I rendered thousands of "reactive" elements. The Chromium JS engine had substantially better performance then the Firefox JS engine.
However, to be fair, this is a strong sign that as a developer, we are doing something wrong. If a JS application feels slow on an average browser in an average computer, it will feel slow on all slower computers. The usability will be crap. In this particular example, the frameworks are not suitable for such a large number of "reactive" elements.
If its having performance issues on Firefox.... Leaving Firefox and making it work on Chrome is part of the problem with the browser wars... I also would consider that a bug in either that framework or your code or both. I rather websites worked the same in all browsers otherwise why bother with JS frameworks that are to be compiled for all browsers.
I use Firefox developer edition as my main browser, and there does seem to be some issue with Angular sites. admin.google.com is particularly bad – but so bad it makes me wonder if they only test in Chrome.
Error logging used to be broken in Firefox at least until last year. I'm not working in frontend at moment and I never got around to submitting a bug (it always happened while at work) but my opinion was that there was a bug somewhere in there where they used a Chromium only API.
And yes, I too have wondered if they only test in Chrome.
Does anyone know why Chromium hasn't fixed this supposedly old regression bug where opening large minified js file in the source tab hangs the whole tab/browser, sometimes for more than 10 seconds even on a fast machine. Can't this be done asynchronously or at least give the user a way to cancel loading it? If you open a large file and then close developer tools, reload the page and open developer tools again, it will try to reopen the last opened file again, blocking chrome for another 10 seconds. Very annoying.
meanwhile I'm the exact opposite. I've been using the firefox dev tools too much that using chrome on someone else's machine is something I feel like I have to put up with.
That's not me saying Firefox's tools are actually better though, there's still a number of weird quirks or features that could be lacking, while also having features I can't find in chrome that I also take for granted
I generally start with Firefox but recently needed to switch to Chrome for JS debugging. There were errors and they simply did not show in the FF console, and whole script tags of inline/embedded javascript was not to be found anywhere I spent 20-30 minutes mucking around looking here and there, and finally switched to Chrome and was done in a few minutes.
To my knowledge, no. They said they were working on it ages ago when they introduced the commands API for webextensions, but I don't think it is high on their priority queue.
