Firefox Dev Tools highlight DOM nodes when clicking an element - firefox

To be clear, this is not highlighting in the sense of finding an element from the DOM Inspector to the page, or vice versa. It's behavior I haven't seen before, but then I usually use Chrome.
I'm debugging a textarea that won't accept clicks, or allow selection, or basically gain focus in any way. I noticed that clicking on the textarea, in the page, caused several DOM nodes in the Inspector to highlight, and then fade away after a second. None of the nodes that highlighted were the textarea; they were parents of the textarea, including the body, but not necessarily all of the parents in between the textarea and the body. There was also a sibling of one of the parents highlighted, as well.
It's one of those things where Firefox is trying to tell me something, but I don't know what. I feel like the answer to my original problem is probably contained in this highlight, if only I knew what it meant.
In the attached screenshot, you can see the textarea highlighted in blue, being the selected element, and the rather grossly-colored highlights on a few other elements; this was right after I clicked on the textarea (in the page, like I was trying to enter some text in it; not in the inspector)
What does it mean?

When the nodes in the markup view (the thing in your screenshot) highlights, it means that these nodes have gone through mutations. These can be of the following manner:
Attribute value change on the node
Addition/Removal of child nodes
Now, what you are actually looking a way to hover the textbox and get the markup view to select your textbox, right ?
You can do that in two ways:
Hit the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + C. You will see an overlay on the page which follows your mouse. Head over to text box and click it.
Click the "Pick an element from the page" button on top left corner of the developer tools and the same node-selector will appear.
For more and deep information : visit the MDN page : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspector

Related

Can the Firefox DevTools Inspector highlight be made sticky?

I'm spending some time writing HTML and CSS, and am using the developer tools in Firefox 53. Specifically, the "HTML/DOM/CSS Inspector".
When you move the mouse over a chunk of HTML in the Inspector window, the corresponding rendered HTML element on the page is highlighted. Plus, there are some helpful grid lines and color overlays and whatnot also drawn over the page, all of which was a good decision on the part of the Mozilla developers. It shows how random divs and other elements might be overlapping, is great for showing where margins are collapsing, etc.
However, when I move the mouse off the HTML tree, all that useful highlighting and overlays vanish. Is there a way to get that highlighting/overlay to "stick"? For example, until I click on another HTML element, or reload the page, or... actively take some action other than simply moving my mouse?
Note that right-clicking the Inspector and selecting the ":hover" menu entry is most emphatically not what I'm looking for. I want to change the mouseover behavior of the Inspector, not that of the page.
(Now I'm going to pour another shot of whiskey and resume fighting with the Rules/Computed-versus-"browser styles" controls. Those were... not as well designed.)
The general highlighter can't be toggled to stay on the page, it only reacts on hovering the nodes.
Only some other highlighters are sticky, like the one for elements matching a specific CSS selector or the CSS grid highlighter, both located within the Rules side panel:
The CSS selector matching highlighter is currently (as of Firefox 53) the one that comes nearest to what you're looking for, though it's missing the grid lines.
Furthermore, there is already a request for adding a sticky element highlighter in Mozilla's bug tracker.

How to programmatically click google maps icons

Take a look at this map:
This map pops up when you visit https://www.hertzcarsales.com/, and click "Change" next to with "Within X miles of Y" dropdown selector. Anyway, I cannot right click on the little H's to inspect with FireBug, and I can't seem to figure out how to access the urls attached to each using watir-webdriver.
When I click on an H I can do
b.as(:text,/Visit this Store/).href
but I can't get them all though.
From what I can tell, I don't think you can. If you peel the map down to where the pins are, they are contained in a CANVAS tag which Selenium cannot see inside.
I did find another way to get what you want. Go here instead, https://www.hertzcarsales.com/locations. Click on the blue "Find a Car Sales Location" button in the middle of the page. That will launch basically the same dialog except there are location summaries on the left side of the page. You can click the View All link in the top left. Now you have every location's info and you can grab the links you wanted.

is there a trick to working with multiple visual studio panel objects at design time

Is there some sort of shortcut key that I am missing here for swapping panels around in the form editor of vs2010?
I have numerous panels which are swapped at runtime according to an enum "toggle" value and the only way I seem to be able to move them back and forth is to make one panel smaller than another and right click it. Half the time I end up selecting some other object in the action of trying to right my panels.
I figured there must be something i'm missing here.
there are icons on the layout toolbar for this task. I pick the panel in properties and move it around with those. Way easier than right clicking and hoping for the best.
edit: although sometimes the buttons are not enabled when you need them to be. Still right clicking a resize handle adorner dot will pop up the context menu where you can then choose to move back/forward.
I still wish there was some key combo I could press. Hitting the 4px of display area that the adorner dot occupies on my screen is sort of a dexterity test of sorts and slows me down.

Can the like button (with comments prompts) exist inside a carousel?

I have a sliding carousel of items, each of which includes its own like button. I want the like buttons to have comments; that is, when the user clicks Like, he should be presented with a prompt to leave a comment (http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/397/). I'm starting to doubt that these goals are compatible and would like to hear if anyone has already achieved it.
The comments on the Like buttons are wider than the items in the carousel, and correctly overflow onto other carousel items. However, some of these items are outside the clipping box, since the carousel items are necessarily inside a div with overflow: hidden (otherwise we wouldn't achieve the effect of the items scrolling into existence upon paging). Because of this, if I click Like on the rightmost item currently visible, the comments prompt that appears will be partially outside the clipping box and thus partially visible.
It appears to me the only possible hope of allowing the comments prompt to overflow the carousel container is to place the prompt outside the container in the dom. This way, assuming we can visually position the prompt next to its Like button where it belongs, it's no longer constrained by the container. This seems within possible, since at the time of this writing the comment prompt is implemented as a separate iframe from the button itself; i.e., this XFBML:
<fb:like width="450"></fb:like>
yields (approximately) this HTML:
<iframe src="facebook.com/like_button.php"></iframe>
<iframe src="facebook.com/comments_widget.php"></iframe>
But if I try to move the comments iframe in the dom, it instantly and permanently becomes empty. Even if I could find a way to detach certain events and prevent this, it shows that an intricate solution is called for, and one which Facebook can break at any time in the future with changes to their implementation. Thus, I can't move the comments in the dom, and thus, the prompt is always in danger of being clipped. Facebook says this on the subject:
If the Like button is placed near the edge of an HTML element with the overflow property set to hidden, the flyout may be clipped or completely hidden when the button is clicked. This can be remedied by setting setting the overflow property to a value other than hidden, such as visible, scroll, or auto.
Clearly in the case of a carousel it's not possible to remove overflow: hidden. Has anyone found a way around this, or should I give up and spend my time elsewhere?
Thanks

Firebug: How to inspect elements changing with mouse movements?

Sometimes I need to inspect elements that are only showing up on a page if you put mouse over some area. The problem is that if you start moving mouse towards firebug console in order to see the changes, mouse-out event is triggered and all changes I am trying to inspect disappear. How to deal with such cases?
Basically I am looking for something that would either:
Switch to firebug console without moving a mouse (using keyboard shortcuts maybe? But I can't figure out how to use firebug with keyboard only)
Have an ability to "freeze" the page so your mouse movements don't trigger any events anymore.
Thanks.
HTML Tooltip (Firebug)
Select the element with the inspector or in the DOM. Go to the "Styles" tab in firebug and click to the small arrow on the tab and select ":hover" (also available ":active"). The state will remain on "hover" and you can select other elements to make them hover.
HTML Tooltip (Firefox developer tools)
Click the button to see three checkboxes, which you can use to set the :hover, :active and :focus pseudo-classes for the selected element
This feature can also be accessed from the popup menu in the HTML view.
If you set one of these pseudo-classes for a node, an orange dot appears in the markup view next to all nodes to which the pseudo-class has been applied:
JQuery Tooltip
Open the console and enter jQuery('.css-class').trigger('mouseover')
Regular Javascript Tooltip
Open the console and enter document.getElementById('yourId').dispatchEvent(new Event('mouseover'));
The style panel in Firebug has a dropdown menu where you can choose the :active or :hover state.
You can also start the debugger on a timer. Enter this command into the console:
setTimeout(function(){ debugger; }, 10000);
This will give you 10 seconds to use the mouse and make the page look the way you want in order to inspect it. When the debugger starts, the page will freeze, and you'll be able to explore the elements in the developer tool tab, without the DOM changing or responding to any additional mouse events.
I think you can also do this :
Choose Firebugs Inspect mode
Hover over the item that pops up the element you wish to inspect and then use the Tab key several times to make Firebug active (I found it tricky to see when Firebug was the active component but nothing like trial and error - when I saw that Firefoxes Find Toolbar was active I'd then Shift + Tab backwards twice to get into Firebug.
Then I'd use the L/R arrow keys to contract/expand elements and U/D arrow keys to navigate through Firebugs console
Worked for me anyway!
For Jquery UI tooltip I finally set up a long delay for the hiding of the element so I have time to inspect it before it's deleted. For example, I used this to inspect the tooltip:
$( document ).tooltip({ hide: {duration: 100000 } });
instead of:
$( document ).tooltip();
You could insert a breakpoint at the start of the mouseout event handler. Its code won't be executed until you allow it to continue, and you can use the DOM inspector and so forth while execution is stopped.
Firebug's hotkey for inspecting elements is Ctrl + Shift + C (Windows/Linux).
Go here for a list of all Firebug keyboard shortcuts.
For the bootstrap tooltip:
$(document ).tooltip({delay: { show: 0, hide: 100000 }});
While selecting :hover in the CSS menu might be nice if you only want to inspect some CSS code, it doesn't work if whatever you want to inspect is changed using JavaScript.
A simple hack in this case is to open Firebug in a different window (top right corner of the Firebug bar) than move your mouse at the desired location and drag and drop something from there out of the browser window. Now you can inspect whatever in the Firebug window. Just don't move your mouse back into the browser window.
For Javascript events such as Mouse over.
Open Firebug/Inspect an element.
Click on the element before the mouseover event, e.g. click on a div. It will turn blue to show it is selected.
Put your mouse over the element and don't move it from this point forward.
Use your ↑/↓ arrow keys to manoeuvre in Firebug.
Use your ←/→ arrow keys to expand/contract code with + or -.
Double tap Tab to get to the CSS pane.
Use the arrow keys to navigate. Use shift and arrow keys to select text. Ctrl & C to copy.
Hold Shift and double tap Tab to get back to the HTML pane.
I'd like to chip in with my preferred method. Putting this little snippet in your console allows you to start the debugger at any time with a simple keypress on your keyboard (F8 is used in this example)
document.addEventListener("keydown", (event) => {if (event.key == 'F8') {debugger}});
You can also use a keycode if you prefer:
document.addEventListener("keydown", (event) => {if (event.keyCode == 119) {debugger}});
I found that Chrome does work a bit differently than Firefox. In particular, menus that close when the mouse is clicked outside of the menu remain open when inspecting them in Chrome (and they close when inspecting them with Firebug). So the advice is to try to use a different development tool in a different browser to see if it makes a difference.
Open console:
If you have javascript based tooltip, find applicable elements in console with appropriate selector. like below and confirm you able to find appropriate element with selectors.
$('your selector')
Write above javascript and Press enter. you will have list of elements.
Now e.g. If library added event on mouseenter enter following script:
$('your selector').mouseenter()
Press enter.
This way you can simulate mouse movement events without actual mouse. and can use actual mouse pointer to investigate thing in debugger tool.
This is an extremely old question by now, but I've found an answer that directly answers the "freeze the browser" portion of the question.
Control + Alt + B. This is "break on mutate". Which means, when you are hovering over an element with firebug engaged (Control + Shift + C), that when the HTML attributes would change, instead they hit a breakpoint, allowing you to easily navigate around to examine for paths, etc.

Resources