Cumbersome and Unresponsive UI

[Jonathan Neufeld]

I couldn't figure-out how to voice my concerns like this properly and I am rather short of time right now so I will post here in the forum.  

Chrome Developer tools have plenty of advantages over others including FireBug and Internet Explorer's developer tools.

However I am very disappointed with the user-interface, I expect more from the creators of the V8 engine and the world's most effective search engine.

Why is there no keyboard support for the developer tools?  In almost every major IDE here is an example of tasks that I can perform quicker than with a mouse:

• Ctrl+Tab - between panes
  
• Home, Shift+End, Delete - Remove all breakpoints or watch expressions
• F9 / Ctrl+F9 - Quickly add / disable / enable breakpoints

I cannot stress the point enough that ditching keyboard interaction will result in a constricted user experience.  Presently for this reason I find Chrome Developer tools very painful to use.  Specifically, I want to see full keyboard support for the following:

• Watch Expressions
• Call Stack
• Scope Variables
• Breakpoints
• DOM Breakpoints
• XHR Breakpoints
• Event Listener Breakpoints
• Workers

I want these panes to accept the focus and I want to be able to navigate using arrow keys, home, end, page-up and page-down keys.

Furthermore, the user-interface is very unresponsive.  This should never occur for something as light-weight and simple as a JavaScript-driven web-application.  We're not talking about multi-core scientific 3D simulation rendering software here, we're talking about web pages.  Why does something as simple as a web-page cause the user-interface to lag and freeze by as much as seconds?  Yes, one-second is an eternity as far as UI-responsiveness goes.  Shouldn't UI concerns run in a separate thread anyhow?  There should never be any lag in user-interaction, ever.

What bothers me most about the approach taken with Chrome developer tools UI as well as other similar applications is an apparent trade-off between eye-candy and performance.  In this case, it appears to me that it was more important to make shaded widgets and colorful buttons in the UI than making a responsive UI.  This may not be the case but this is certainly how it comes across.

That is all for now.

[John J Barton]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 4:34 PM, Jonathan Neufeld <exsu...@gmail.com> wrote:

I couldn't figure-out how to voice my concerns like this properly and I am rather short of time right now so I will post here in the forum.  

 
When you have time to do a proper job, you can open bug reports on   https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues

Chrome Developer tools have plenty of advantages over others including FireBug and Internet Explorer's developer tools.

However I am very disappointed with the user-interface, I expect more from the creators of the V8 engine and the world's most effective search engine.

 

I expect that polite requests and suggestions will work better than nonsense comparisons.  BTW the code was originally written by someone from Apple.
 

Why is there no keyboard support for the developer tools?  

If you type "chrome devtools keyboard shortcuts" into the above-mentioned search engine the first hit is:

https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/shortcuts
 

In almost every major IDE here is an example of tasks that I can perform quicker than with a mouse:

• Ctrl+Tab - between panes
  
• Home, Shift+End, Delete - Remove all breakpoints or watch expressions
• F9 / Ctrl+F9 - Quickly add / disable / enable breakpoints

I cannot stress the point enough that ditching keyboard interaction will result in a constricted user experience.  Presently for this reason I find Chrome Developer tools very painful to use.  Specifically, I want to see full keyboard support for the following:

• Watch Expressions
• Call Stack
• Scope Variables
• Breakpoints
• DOM Breakpoints
• XHR Breakpoints
• Event Listener Breakpoints
• Workers

I want these panes to accept the focus and I want to be able to navigate using arrow keys, home, end, page-up and page-down keys.

After you have tried the existing keybindings you can request additions.  Since you seem quite passionate about keyboard support, I suggest you contribute some improvements using the open source, see https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/contributing

 

Furthermore, the user-interface is very unresponsive.  

I don't find this to be the case generally. However there are specific cases where there could be improvements.  By providing specific test cases where you find performance problems, these problems can be fixed.
 

This should never occur for something as light-weight and simple as a JavaScript-driven web-application.  We're not talking about multi-core scientific 3D simulation rendering software here, we're talking about web pages.  Why does something as simple as a web-page cause the user-interface to lag and freeze by as much as seconds?  Yes, one-second is an eternity as far as UI-responsiveness goes.  Shouldn't UI concerns run in a separate thread anyhow?  There should never be any lag in user-interaction, ever.

The UI runs in a separate process. Lag that I see mostly results when very large data sets have to processed, esp lots of console logging. But again a specific example will clarify a great deal.
 

What bothers me most about the approach taken with Chrome developer tools UI as well as other similar applications is an apparent trade-off between eye-candy and performance.  In this case, it appears to me that it was more important to make shaded widgets and colorful buttons in the UI than making a responsive UI.  This may not be the case but this is certainly how it comes across.

Your theory has no basis in reality.  The performance issues are not related to fancy graphics.

jjb