Intent to unship Developer Toolbar (aka GCLI)

[Patrick Brosset]

Tl;dr: The DevTools team is planning to pref off and later unship the
Developer Toolbar (aka GCLI), starting in Firefox 60.

The Developer Toolbar [1] gives a command line access to some power-user
and developer actions in Firefox.

It can be opened via the tools menu or with shift+F2 and appears as a
footer bar at the bottom of the browser window.

Some of the commands it supports are: restart (to restart firefox),
screenshot (to take a screenshot of the page), opening DevTools, listing
cookies, listing prefs, listing addons, etc.

It is based on GCLI [2] which is vendored in mozilla-central.

It was added to Firefox back in 2012 (in Firefox 17 I believe), but has
never received much usage over the past 6 years.

The main reasons being that it's a fairly hard to discover and that it's a
tool only for people comfortable with a command line environment.

As of Firefox 60 we intend to pref off the developer toolbar, and then
remove the associated code from Firefox in 61.

The reasons for this are:

- Both the Developer Toolbar UI and the GCLI upstream library have become
unmaintained.

- Some of its features are broken, some ever since e10s ([3][4]).

- It is blocking the UnsafeSetInnerHTML work [5].

- Usage numbers are very low.

- Alternatives exist for the most used commands.

- We have other ideas for allowing power users to access common actions via
the keyboard which appear more adapted and more DevTools-related (e.g.
having special commands in the DevTools console, or having a command
palette like Chrome has which originally came from text editors like
Sublime Text).

The meta bug to follow the work around unshipping the Developer Toolbar is
[6].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/GCLI

[2] https://github.com/joewalker/gcli

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1228034

[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1376726

[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1444394

[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429421

[stripTM]

I have used GCLI a lot, I also recognize that as devtools have been
enriched it is more efficient for me to manage cookies for example the
storage tool. And other features were also broken with e10s

+1 to "having special commands in the DevTools console"

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[Matt Claypotch]

Biggest concern for me is ensuring we document the new recommended way to
do everything that's there.

Also, is there another way to get the lovely dpi option on the screenshot
command?

~potch

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 12:55 AM, Patrick Brosset <pbro...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

[Harald Kirschner]

We will as usual work with the MDN team to update the GCLI page with
migration paths.

> Also, is there another way to get the lovely dpi option on the screenshot
command?

Devtools' screenshots feature uses the same backend as GCLI, so we might
want to carry over some options into devtools' preferences when removing
the code and migrating over code that we still need.