meandering wildly

New in Firefox 3.1: Linkified View Source

Look what Curtis just did:

Linky!

Curtis Bartley is the newest member of the Firefox front end team and, to get his feet wet, he made the world a better place by fixing a very old bug. And its 7 duplicate bugs.

Specifically, he set it up so that resources which are referenced in source are now clickable links. Want to know what that external javascript does? Click the link, and it will be loaded in the source viewer. Likewise CSS. Maybe you clicked “View Source” only to discover you were looking at a frame set, and actually wanted the source for a frame - that works too.

And yes, back and forward keyboard shortcuts work. And yes, both relative and absolute links work. And yes, you can have this in a tab instead of a separate window, either by sticking view-source: on to the front of your URLs (see?), or by finding one of the addons that does it for you.

Way to go Curtis, keep ‘em coming!

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 Mozilla, Usability, Work

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21 Comments

1. Eric Shepherd replies at 11th November 2008, 4:04 pm :

Woohoo!
2. Vladimir Dzhuvinov replies at 11th November 2008, 4:24 pm :

Neat!
3. arno replies at 11th November 2008, 4:37 pm :

A few weeks ago, I made an extension to add that functionnality to firefox. But I needed to parse rendered source, which is awful. So, it’s nice to see that bug fixed the right way in mozilla
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9047
4. Damian replies at 11th November 2008, 4:48 pm :

If you can open it in a new tab there seems to be a consistency bug here, you can not simply middle click the “view source” option in the context menu.
5. Johnath replies at 11th November 2008, 4:52 pm :

@Damian - File that bug!

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Toolkit&component=View+Source
6. Damian replies at 11th November 2008, 4:56 pm :

Might be a dupe, but couldn’t find anything so filed the bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=464336
7. Damian replies at 11th November 2008, 4:58 pm :

@Johnath haha, hadn’t seen your comment was already testing and filing, but thanks for the component names I can never figure out to put what in what.
8. Eric Shepherd replies at 11th November 2008, 5:02 pm :

Would maybe be nice if there was a back button somewhere you could click to get back to the previous source if you accidentally click a link.
9. sky replies at 11th November 2008, 5:05 pm :

cool! I filed this bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=464339
10. Ryan Scott Scheel replies at 11th November 2008, 5:26 pm :

I can tell you now, this is going to be a very useful feature for me. It is my new most awaited. Great article.
11. brion replies at 11th November 2008, 6:46 pm :

*squeeeeeeee!!!!!* Best feature ever…
12. view-source: Now Supports&hellip replies at 11th November 2008, 8:43 pm :

[...] very cool change landed in Firefox 3.1. View source will now create links where appropriate (a rather old bug I might add). I must have copy/pasted millions of URL’s [...]
13. ronin replies at 11th November 2008, 10:19 pm :

Damian’s bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=464336

Add those votes!
14. Sean replies at 12th November 2008, 4:45 pm :

Chrome already does this, but it’s nice to see that Firefox will too.
15. Stanley M. replies at 13th November 2008, 12:18 am :

I won’t use Firefox until It lets me apply changes to the source code. Sticking to Opera…
16. numerodix replies at 13th November 2008, 3:12 am :

w00t!
17. Przepełnienie bufora 2 |&hellip replies at 13th November 2008, 6:18 am :

[...] Curtis Bartley - świeży w zespole Firefoxa już dał coś developerom http://www. Dodał do podglądu strony www możliwość klikania na odnośniki. [...]
18. Firefox 3.1 vine cu bunat&hellip replies at 13th November 2008, 6:34 am :

[...] Firefox 3.1 vine cu bunatati pentru developeri. De abia astept sa fie lansat. Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 1:34 pm by Catalin Istratoiu. [...]
19. Erik Vold replies at 16th November 2008, 1:14 am :

This is a great bug fix!
20. Dev Blog AF83 » Blo&hellip replies at 17th November 2008, 1:29 pm :

[...] http://blog.johnath.com/2008/11/11/new-in-firefox-31-linkified-view-source/ : une nouveauté intéressante de Firefox 3.1 pour les dévs. [...]
21. meandering wildly »&hellip replies at 1st December 2008, 8:33 am :

[...] don’t often get personal in this blog. Mostly I talk about Firefox things, security things, or how to make reasonably awesome bread. I don’t want to inundate my [...]