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Jach10/12/20240 repliesview on HN

My needs for webdev debugging have always been satisfied by Firefox, but last time I was really in the weeds ~4 years ago I had the feeling both it and Chrome were still missing things I took for granted with Firebug long ago.

I don't mind nice and powerful tools, but one thing I learned with Java (where the tools are so much nicer and so much more powerful) is that if you're leaning on them heavily, that's kind of a sign you've messed up. Like on the scale of severity (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts...), at least as severe as really bad coupling or brittleness. Thank goodness for the tools that let people efficiently figure things out and get on with things, but it's really better to have not needed to be in such a situation to begin with.

I have a similar view with valgrind -- amazing tool everyone would rather exist than not, one could imagine a "Google Valgrind" and "Mozilla Valgrind" competing on mild differences of amazing, but really, life is better if you can just use a managed language and never have to deal with any flavor of valgrind. I think there are ways to do webdev that significantly reduce the need to use any browser dev tools at all, though the domain necessitates some use. ClojureScript in 2014 was showing the way.