Use Tables!

bug 341764 is now fixed on both trunk and the 1.8 branch, meaning you can now debug from the slow script warning dialog if you have a debugger like Firebug or Venkman open. Woo!

On the title: The Dialog of death just sounds so much better than the “Slow Script warning”. Regardless, if a developer encounters a dialog like it unexpectedly, it generally means they screwed up. Unfortunately, right now they can’t in any way check why that happened. If they stop the script, then that’s just that and they have no way of going back into the slow state. If they choose to continue running the script they won’t get anywhere either because usually in cases like that all other UI is hung.

Solution? Add a debug script button to the dialog if and only if there’s an active debugger open. The debugger can be Firebug or Venkman, but it should work just as well if an external debugger is in use (like the ATF one that you get when developing XUL stuff in Eclipse). There’s a patch for branch and for trunk on bug 341764, but I would definitely prefer if this solution only ended up on branch (permanently), given that creating an optional dependency in DOM on JSD seems not that right (in this case optional means that DOM will still build fine without JSD (–disable-jsd) and will just use it if it can).

So now the waiting is for the review people to notice my requests and hopefully have time soon.

technorati tags:javascript, soc, mozilla, slow-script-dialog, google, jsd, venkman, firebug, webdevelopment

So the last few days I’ve been trying to get a profile of Venkman/JSD startup. First I’ll talk about the hurdles I met along the way for a bit. I decided that the results and conclusions I took from them are probably better off on a wiki page. Please feel free to let me know what you think about them. (more…)