Firefox 16: Breaking the Boundaries of Coding Ethics

What makes a web browser most efficient – user-friendliness or developer-friendliness? Google Chrome has always believed that browsers are for mass use and so, has added lots of useful apps to offer a pleasant user-experience. However, Mozilla Firefox, favors “coding-friendly” features.

At the end of August, Mozilla released its Firefox 16, and with it, introduced two exciting coding tools- the “developer toolbar” and “command line” tool. The developer toolbar is a web programmer’s best friend. It let’s you inspect the HTML, JavaScript and CSS, so that you know what lies beneath a beautiful web page. To check how it works, open a website and hit Shift+F2. The toolbar will appear at the bottom of the page. It features console, inspector, debugger button and command line.

The command line works just like the way people use “Ctrl+F” command. The only difference is that instead of words, it helps you search a particular programming element faster. For instance, if you type “inspect h3” and click return, an inspector panel will open displaying all the H3 tags in the page.

It offers 16 inbuilt commands and some of them are- “resize” for responsive design, “pagemod” for online editing and “cookie” for inspecting cookies. Console, inspector and debugger buttons offer one click access to all the elements behind the layout of a web page.

These new tools are certainly very helpful for newbie programmers, but they also break the boundaries of professional ethics. Introduction of developer toolbar will encourage code copycats. After all, if everything is easily available, why should someone spend hours to create a great banner or menu bar?