Mozilla Delivers Adapter for Cross-Browser Testing in Firefox
If you work with web content very much, you're probably familiar with doing debugging and content editing directly from within a browser. You may also be familiar with debugging and testing web apps across browsers.
For some time now, Mozilla has been focused on delivering tools for doing development tasks directly within Firefox. For example, users have been experimenting with WebIDE, a development environment for HTML5 apps built into Firefox. Now, Mozilla is offering an adapter that lets it connect the Firefox developer tools with Chrome and iOS to help developers test their web apps directly within Firefox.
The adapter is available in Firefox’s Nightly builds with the Firefox Developer Tools Add-on installed. It works with the current beta of Chrome (37) and Safari on iOS.
"Developing across multiple browsers and devices is the main issue developers have when building applications. Wouldn’t it be great to debug your app across desktop, Android and iOS with one tool? We believe the Web is powerful enough to offer a Mobile Web development solution that meets these needs!"
"Enter an experimental Firefox add-on called the Firefox Tools Adaptor that connects the Firefox Developer Tools to other major browser engines. This add-on is taking the awesome tools we’ve built to debug Firefox OS and Firefox on Android to the other major mobile browsers starting with Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS. So far these tools include our Inspector, Debugger and Console."
"Nothing can replace on-device testing. But developer tools on devices have been cumbersome and vendor-specific. Cross-platform development involved learning and switching between all the different browsers developer tools."
"This add-on allows you to use your desktop environment to work on several small screen devices without using up precious screen space. You simply use the device and find out what is going wrong on your computer – regardless of platform and browser engine on the device."
Mozilla has made a video available that shows how the adapter works, which you can watch here. If you want to tinker with the tool, follow the Firefox Tools Adapter instructions to get started.