Browser Toolbox is now allowed by default in local builds

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Brian Grinstead

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Jul 17, 2017, 2:23:28 PM7/17/17
to Firefox Dev
One Firefox development pet peeve of mine is that the Browser Toolbox is disabled by default. I've lost count of the number of times I've clicked around in the UI to re-enable it for each clean profile. Also, opening the Browser Toolbox triggers a prompt to accept the connection, which makes the whole opening process clunky.

This has been changed as of Bug 1375280. In local builds the Browser Toolbox can now be opened without any extra configuration or prompting. The best ways to open it are either `./mach run --jsdebugger` or using the keyboard shortcut (ctrl+alt+shift+i / cmd+opt+shift+i).

About security: this change only applies to local builds, but it's important to know that Browser Toolbox communicates with a debugging server that allows chrome privileged code execution. The server is only accessible from the loopback interface and doesn’t start until one of these things happen:
1) You request the Browser Toolbox opens from the UI
2) The process is started with --jsdebugger which opens the Browser Toolbox at startup
3) The process is started with --start-debugger-server <PORT> which starts the server but not the Browser Toolbox

Brian
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Patrick Brosset

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Jul 18, 2017, 3:33:59 AM7/18/17
to Brian Grinstead, Firefox Dev
Thanks Brian for making our lives easier! This is great.

Sebastian Zartner

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Jul 18, 2017, 3:45:44 AM7/18/17
to Patrick Brosset, Brian Grinstead, Firefox Dev
That's really great news! This also annoyed me ever since the Browser Toolbox was added. So, thank you a lot, Brian!

Sebastian
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