Do you ever wish you had an easy command line interface for you browser? If you’re answer is “yes” you are about to get exactly what you wanted.
Mozilla has just posted information about an new command line feature available in the Firefox Beta, Aurora and Nightly builds. This feature has been available in pre-release builds of Firefox for quite a while now, however now that is somewhat closer to release Mozilla has posted a video of it in action, which you can check out here:
The console is easily accessible by pressing Shift+F2, and allows control over a number of aspects of the browser, from opening / closing / clearing the console, and inspecting page elements to managing addons and preferences.
Some users might be aware of the brilliant Ubiquity addon for Firefox that added a powerful text-based extensible interface to Firefox. Unfortunately that was only a Mozilla Labs project which ceased development and doesn’t support Firefox versions beyond Firefox 3.6. The new console project is similar, but still quite different.
Like Ubiquity though, this new command line interface is extensible, allowing developers to create their own commands. Mozilla themselves will be adding more commands in the future. For now you can explore the command line using the handy “help” command, which explains the syntax of other commands.
Just a few months back, integrated developer tools in Firefox were non-existent. FireBug fulfilled most of the needs of developers using Firefox. All other browsers however managed to offer FireBug-like tools integrated in the browser. Mozilla decided to take a different direction, and provide a suite of tools, each focussed on one task. Firefox has since added a JavaScript scratchpad, a console for logging network requests, and JavaScript and CSS errors; they have also added a Style Editor for editing CSS, and a responsive design view. Firefox seems to be aiming to offer not only a testing environment for web apps, but an entire web development suite.
You can download the Firefox beta with with this feature from here.
