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DOM Inspector Freed!

I just resolved bug 271812, which means you can now get the DOM Inspector for 1.9 products off of AMO. Nightly testers (and future beta 4 users) will notice that it’s no longer included by default in the product. You can get the add-on here! The UI is no longer coupled to the release of Firefox, so we can update things independent of the Firefox release cycle. Certain back-end changes will still depend on the Gecko release schedule, but I think I’m OK with that since that would require shipping binary components if we didn’t want to do that. Binary components are hard, and other add-ons (like Firebug) depend on some of them too. It’s best if they stay a part of layout for the time being.

February 27, 2008 | Filed Under Mozilla 

comments

18 Responses to “DOM Inspector Freed!”

  1. Darren VanBuren on February 28th, 2008

    The DOM Inspector is an essential part of Firefox. We need to include it by default. If you don’t, you lose a user (me) and possibly others.

  2. Shawn Wilsher on February 28th, 2008

    @Darren
    I’m sorry, but if that’s how you feel, so be it. You don’t seem to be using Firefox for the right reasons if that’s the case anyway. Keeping the DOM Inspector bound to Firefox’s release schedule was a crappy situation.

  3. mcdavis on February 28th, 2008

    I think this is great news; it’s been on my wish list for a long time. Along with the reasons you already mentioned, now I can send end users to AMO when they didn’t install DOM Inspector along with Firefox, instead of making them reinstall Firefox from scratch.

  4. Boris on February 28th, 2008

    So this means no DOM inspector in mochitest, ever, right? Don’t forget to wontfix bug 417355, then?

  5. Steffen on February 28th, 2008

    I think this is the right decision. I use the DOM Inspector myself (although less then a few years ago since Firebug and the Web Developer Extension arrived) and I don’t see a problem to install it like any other extension.

  6. David Naylor on February 28th, 2008

    Darren, stop sulking. Just get the extension.

    This move is great. The DOM inspector does nothing for the average user and is much better off as an extension. Frankly, this should have been done much earlier.

  7. monk.e.boy on February 28th, 2008

    Love the DOM!!!

    Who cares where it lives, just so long as YOU are happy that you can make it better for us :-)

    V.v.v.v.v.happy.

    The DOM inspector is the quickest way to show developers why firefox is better. That with the DOM inspectThis add-on, right click on some item, inspectThis, BAM in the Dom inspector with all the css rules displayed.

    Their eyes pop right out of their heads in amazement.

    monk.e.boy

  8. Christopher Finke on February 28th, 2008

    I say good call on decoupling it. Less bloat in the installer and more freedom for Inspector updates are both Good Things.

  9. Shawn Wilsher on February 28th, 2008

    @Boris
    It is still in the Mozilla CVS tree, so --enable-extensions=inspector will still work just fine.

  10. Kurt on February 28th, 2008

    Long overdue! Installed it as soon as I seen the link in the bug report! Thanks Shawn!!!

    Now to get it out of the sandbox so anyone can get it easily.

  11. Michael on February 29th, 2008

    “more freedom for Inspector updates are both Good Things”

    That’s good, but presumably it also means that Firefox can be updated without updating DOMI, so DOMI releases could lag behind Firefox releases…

  12. Shawn Wilsher on February 29th, 2008

    @Michael
    Sure, but I don’t intend to let that happen.

  13. Michael on February 29th, 2008

    @Shawn
    Good to hear that (and to see this blog post, actually). I got the impression from a couple of your bugzilla comments that DOMI had been dumped on you and you weren’t exactly thrilled to be taking it on, so I feared you (and/or Mozilla) may not be committed to it for the future. If that fear wasn’t justified, then sorry for doubting you (obviously not the best thing to be jumping to conclusions based on bugzilla comments, but in the absence of other info…)

  14. Shawn Wilsher on February 29th, 2008

    @Michael
    Naw – DOMi is where I got started with Mozilla. I just wish more people contributed to it sometimes.

  15. Michael Andreas on March 12th, 2008

    Hi Shawn, just want to show support for freeing DOMi. This is great news indeeed. I’ve always preferred (re)installing an extension rather than (re)installing Firefox to get the DOMi.

  16. Andrea on April 1st, 2008

    The problem is that I can’t install it.
    I have Firefox 2.0.0.13 but the firefox addons site tells me to upgrade….

    “Upgrade Firefox to use this add-on”

    Should I just be patient for the next version to be released?

    Thanks

    Andrea

  17. Shawn Wilsher on April 1st, 2008

    @Andrea

    You’ll have to re-install Firefox and select custom install to get the DOM Inspector for Firefox 2. The version for Firefox 3 does not work in Firefox 2.

  18. Adhara on April 1st, 2008

    Much easier…. I install Firefox 3 beta 4 !!!

    Thanks!

    Bye!