The design of RDM

Developer Tools
#1

I were a bit frustrated with the new design of Responsive Design Manager introduced during the fall and unfortunately it haven’t eased for me since.

What were the purpose of the changes?

The new design made the RDM forgot my previous settings at close/re-open (bug 1332053, 1248619), trashed my saved custom screen sizes, made it laggy only because of centering (bug 1318340) and took away the grabbers for resizing (bug 1342561, appearently you can just drag the border of the window, who knew?).

In return for these mistakes we got a very tiny, very white new UI which takes up alot more precious height space and doesn’t make sense visually compared to the rest of Firefox.

If I’m reading between the lines of bug 1330425 correctly the thought behind RDM v2 could have been to prepare for a multi-viewport layout? In which context the changes makes a little more sense. If that really is the case I’d argue we don’t need a multi-viewport function and certainly not instead of the important basic functioning. Yeah, Sizzy is fun and cool for 2 minutes but it already exists but I don’t see the use practically.

As the issues with RDM v2 doesn’t seem to be fixed I’d vote a regress to RDM v1 until v2 has something positive to bring.

#2

Sorry to hear you are unhappy with the new design!

You are correct that the ultimate goal was to built a multi-viewport RDM tool. We still plan to build this in the future, and I believe it can offer a lot more than tools like Sizzy do today, but let’s not get too focused on possible future features here.

Anyway, looking at current state, I agree there are additional toolbars that seem like wasted space when only a single viewport can currently appear. The custom devices feature in the new UI allows saving custom sizes along with extra info like UA, etc.

The redesign also reworked the tool to move away from XUL to HTML, so it is quite unlikely that we will go back. Instead, we need to improve the tool we have. Perhaps you can help us work on some of the issues you’ve mentioned?

#3

Let’s focus on possible futures I say. It’s apparently already affecting the tool. Do you have a more developed idea to share or that I can read on?

I actually tried to locate the find the code for RDM without success. I could use a pointer :slight_smile:

#4

Unfortunately, I don’t have much to share right now about the multi-viewport plans because it’s not an active project at this time. As far as I know, the only visible impact of the yet-to-implemented multiple viewports in what you see today is that there are currently several toolbars where you might otherwise put one toolbar (since some items were planned to affect all viewports vs. each viewport separately).

The other issues you mentioned are certainly frustrating, but they aren’t really caused by or related to plans to have multiple viewports.

It would probably be reasonable to condense the toolbars in some way, but this may require some back and forth for a bit, since all design changes are subjective.

As for the code, you can find it at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/devtools/client/responsive.html. Check http://firefox-dev.tools/ for various guides to get started.