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As a guy who writes software who doesn't write much html (because web is hard) I can't help but feel that having all these devtools built in by default, while nice for developers, seems silly to have wasting space on the hard drives of millions of users. They will never use the source viewers, live editing, page heuristics, etc, and it reeks of feature creep to me, and one product trying to be too many things at once.


It may be a waste of space, yes, but space is cheap.

Also, it is extremely valuable to have these tools on every browser I happen to use. I can see what's wrong with my website--or anybody's website--at any computer. If you go to some page and something doesn't work, I can just open the developer tools on your browser and try to sort it out.

So while most people don't need these tools most of the time, they can still be useful once in a while and have a negligible cost.


Some stats: ~350 million users[1] ~17Mb download[2]

Lets assume a full 25% is dev tools (I think its likely to be much less), so 4.25Mb per user. That's 1418Tb, or just under 500 3Tb disks. Considering that's spread across 350 million users, I think that's not too much at all, and its probably much less.

[1]https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/e/ed/Analyst_report_Q1_2010.... [2]http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html


> seems silly to have wasting space on the hard drives of millions of users.

I'd be more worried about memory consumption, wasted CPU cycles, lost opportunities to let the CPU sleep, the cost of running CI tests...

I am also worried about the increase in the attack surface exposed to random pages downloaded from the Web.


All Firefox Developer Tools are lazy loading so they do not use extra memory unless you open them.

Also, having the tools built in means that they are tested every time any core Firefox code is changed leading to a much more stable environment.




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