Intent to unship: WebIDE and "Connect" page

[Julian Descottes]

(Apologies to those of you who are subscribed to both dev-developer-tools

and firefox-dev, and receiving this email twice).

TL;DR: In Firefox 68 we will port most of the remote debugging capabilities
from WebIDE and the Connect… page to about:debugging. We will subsequently
remove these separate tools in the following release. More details below.

WebIDE is available via Tools > Web Developer > WebIDE.

The Connect Page is available via Tools > Web Developer > Connect…

If you use any of these and have concerns about this, please let us know.

----

Why are we thinking about unshipping?

Firefox engineers have built several tools that provide remote debugging
capabilities over the course of the years, and although the end goal is
similar, each one uses slightly different user interfaces and workflows, as
they were responding to different business goals.

This initiative streamlines all the remote debugging entry points into a
single one, removing roadblocks such as mismatched or outdated interface
elements, obsolete non-working features, additional separate windows, etc,
to increase developer’s productivity and provide a more robust experience
(as a data point, WebIDE has a 70% rate of connection failures).

Proposed timeline:

The proposed plan is as follows:

- Firefox 68: ship the new about:debugging and show a deprecation notice in
WebIDE

- Firefox 69: hide WebIDE and the Connect Page behind a preference

- Firefox 70: remove completely WebIDE and the Connect Page

Ported features:

- connect to remote browsers via USB

- connect to remote browsers via network (hostname:port)

- open DevTools for a remote Tab

- open DevTools for a remote Add-on

- open DevTools for a remote Main Process

- profile performance of a remote browser

New features:

- open DevTools for a remote Worker

- improved connection troubleshooting

Features coming later:

- WiFi debugging: we will add a new WiFi debugging flow for GeckoView
runtimes (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1469089). In the
meantime, it is possible to use ADB portforwarding to debug a device via
WiFi if needed.

- screenshot: will be added (
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1497780), we will also work on
a screencasting feature (
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1492738)

- read/write preferences: WebIDE allowed to change the preferences of the
remote device by offering a UI similar to about:config.

Dropped features:

- application development: features related to application development are
already broken in WebIDE and will not be ported.

How to test the new about:debugging

The new about:debugging is enabled in Nightly since the 1st of April. Open
about:debugging on Nightly to test it out.

We might have missed something, which is why we need your feedback before
we proceed to remove the feature (and the code) as we don’t want to disrupt
your workflow.

Please let us know

Thank you!

[Mark Banner]

On 03/04/2019 07:58, Julian Descottes wrote:
> How to test the new about:debugging
>
> The new about:debugging is enabled in Nightly since the 1st of April.
> Open about:debugging on Nightly to test it out.
>
>
> We might have missed something, which is why we need your feedback
> before we proceed to remove the feature (and the code) as we don’t
> want to disrupt your workflow.
>

Has any thought been given to xpcshell-tests? Currently when you run
with --jsdebugger, it specifies using the Connect route which was fairly
easy. Maybe we could now change the tests to open about:debugging
(semi)automatically?

I've just tried the about:debugging page with an xpcshell-test, and it
will connect, but then you can't do anything - it complains about the
browser being an old version (I suspect this is because xpcshell doesn't
always have version information).

Also, where should bugs be filed, is there a meta they should be filed
against?

Thanks,

Mark

[Julian Descottes]

> Has any thought been given to xpcshell-tests?

No extra thoughts, but we normally have the same features as the connect
page.
So if there's something that can't be done with the new about:debugging,
that's a bug.

> Currently when you run with --jsdebugger, it specifies using the Connect
route which was fairly easy. Maybe we could now change the tests to open
about:debugging (semi)automatically?

Yes we should do that, we missed this. At least update
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/xpcshell/head.js#437-444,
and as you said maybe try to open about:debugging immediately, ideally with
`localhost:6000` always added and ready to connect to.

> I've just tried the about:debugging page with an xpcshell-test, and it
will connect, but then you can't do anything -
> it complains about the browser being an old version (I suspect this is
because xpcshell doesn't always have version information).

I suspect you want to target the main process here? Processes are hidden by
default.
Can you try setting devtools.aboutdebugging.process-debugging to true in
about:config and see if you can debug what you're interested in?
Good point about xpcshell not having the runtime info we expect for
backward compat checks, we should probably special case it.

I managed to debug an xpcshell test with the new about:debugging:
[image: image.png]
The about:devtools-toolbox UI is a bit confused (header mostly), but
debugging works.

> Also, where should bugs be filed, is there a meta they should be filed
against?

Yes! Please file bugs against our main meta
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1462208, we triage them twice
a week.
I tried to compile the items raised here in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541517. Feel free to add to
this bug or log other ones if relevant.

Thanks for the feedback!

> _______________________________________________
> firefox-dev mailing list
> firef...@mozilla.org
> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev
>

[echaroe...@gmail.com]

This isn't a big problem, but one of the ways of running Gaia (which I am interested in) that doesn't involve a bunch of complicated stuff) won't work.