We should enhance our developer UI experience for our developer users. If we know that the user is a developer, that opens up a ton of possibilities. Some easy possibilities come to mind:
- Move the refresh toolbar button popup menu to always be available
- Rename the context menu uses of "location" to "URL" (e.g. "Copy Link Address" → "Copy URL Address")
Devlin says that we can merge in the concept of extension developer mode, which is awesome, and I look forward to learning from the experience of him and the extensions team in this area.
One way to start is to move forward with UI experimentation. We should whip up a feature flag (an about://flags flag, perhaps?) with a tristate of [Current UI|Future non-dev UI experience|Future enhanced dev UI experience] so that we can keep shipping the current UI while experimenting with pushing forward our UI for our developer users.
We should enhance our developer UI experience for our developer users. If we know that the user is a developer, that opens up a ton of possibilities. Some easy possibilities come to mind:
- Move the reload toolbar button popup menu to always be available
- Rename the context menu uses of "location" to "URL" (e.g. "Copy Link Address" → "Copy Link URL")
Devlin says that we can merge in the concept of extension developer mode, which is awesome, and I look forward to learning from the experience of him and the extensions team in this area.
One way to start is to move forward with UI experimentation. We should whip up a feature flag (an about://flags flag, perhaps?) with a tristate of [Current UI|Future non-dev UI experience|Future enhanced dev UI experience] so that we can keep shipping the current UI while experimenting with pushing forward our UI for our developer users.
Woo! I'm super excited for this. I think that, if we get it right, it can make things cleaner (and safer!) for non-developer users, and maybe make things easier for developers.
Other general things we can toggle for developers:
- Right-click -> "View page source", "Inspect"
- Wrench Menu -> More Tools -> Developer Tools
- The DevTools shortcuts (Ctrl+Shift+[C | I | J])
- The View-Source shortcut (Ctrl + U)
- Opening devtools at all? Or make it harder? (Protect folks from pasting random snippets into facebook)
Easy extensions-related devtools things:
- Loading unpacked extensions, packing extensions
- All the extra info on chrome://extensions
- Extension Action context menu -> Inspect Popup
Eventual things to roll in for extensions:
- The Developer Mode warning bubble (this shows when the user has unpacked extensions loaded, since we can't verify those against the webstore). It would be great to not need to show this - it's a constant source of annoyance.
- Entire extension APIs (like debugger, devtools)
Comment 1 by rdevlin....@chromium.org
, Dec 27