User:GijsKruitbosch/JS Debugging

Things I've heard so far:

• Persist state [in context of xulrunner?] - give functionality to save and delete a dump of the watches and breakpoints set, and auto-load that at debugger startup so you can continue with whatever you were doing before you last closed the debugger for that app. Could this be done URL-based for website stuff? (talking to Daniel Glazman)
• Give direct access to profiling data - right now you can save it as html or text, but you can't view it directly (or so I was told, haven't verified this). If you're debugging and don't want to let go of the browser which is 'breaked' (wondering if that's right in English...) then that's a problem because you need that browser to view your profile output. Which is kinda odd and confusing and not really a Nice Thing. (talking to Hish)
• Anonymous functions get lumped together when profiling. Baaaad. On the other hand, you can just rename the functions yourself...
• Getters/setters? [Bug on file. Might want that fixed. Though - how many webdevs use getters/setters? Does IE support them at all, for instance...?]
• JS 1.7?
• Asking an Opera evang. guy what he would want from a JS Debugger (they don't have any):
  • Be given access to the values of (any/all) variables at runtime
  • Set breakpoints and step through code.
  • I don't think he thought of anything else... :-)
• Be able to debug from the "Slow script" warning thing, because you want to be able to see what's going on if your script is unexpectedly looping insanely or something like that. (Hish or Daniel or... I don't remember who came up with this)
• Give access to the DOM Inspector if you have a variable which is referencing an element in the page.
• Provide a real js console to evaluate expression and actually have an effect on the website, instead of the lousy functionality of the current console.
• Better XBL debugging (this is outside the scope of a web development thing too, perhaps?). Daniel Glazman named a few weird bugs - need to check if they've been filed.