Chrome DevTools - better performance than Firebug
June 19, 2019
Chrome DevTools - better performance than Firebug
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Chrome DevTools
I used Chrome DevTools pretty regularly to sneak a look at the code of a webpage, either to do web development, or more likely nowadays, because I'm doing some data analysis and need to figure out how to scrape the data off the page and into R. Because it's baked right into Chrome, my regular browser, it's only ever a quick whack of F12 away.
- The selection widget is particularly handy--I can quickly and easily see how an element on a page fits in the page's structure
- Being able to edit CSS rules on the fly is great--that way I can see what's actually going to happen.
- It's also nice to be able to poke around in the Computed tab and see how an element's box model attributes are currently assigned and what will happen if I adjust, for example, the padding.
- I really miss Firebug's box model tools, which worked a bit more intuitively.
- The Console is handy, but can be hard to work with.
- I really wish there were a few more tools for outlining block elements and a color picker.
- Since DevTools is baked into Chrome, it's free--which means the ROI is off the charts.
- Further, because it is baked in, you don't have to spend forever looking around for another extension
- And unlike Firebug, your webpages aren't going to render REALLY slowly if you have it open.
While I like the look and feel of Firebug a lot better than DevTools, the Chrome version is just better. Firebug has (or had? I haven't used it in several years) some serious performance issues that would slow Firefox down to a crawl if you didn't forget to turn it off. Unfortunately, that was a deal breaker for me--I can't be bothered to make a decision about every single webpage, ie. wehther I might need to look at the source code for something. With DevTools, I don't worry about it.