Mozilla is currently testing a new feature called Time Travel Debugging which is currently aimed for developer use and presently is available in Mac OS Nightly Build of Firefox.
Time Travel Debugging is just a remake of the feature WebReplay. WebReplay allows developers to record the behavior of JS elements and go back to earlier states of flow. This will preserve the JS behaviours and DOM structures and mostly affect graphical alterations.
These features help developers when their web apps run a large amount of CSS3, JavaScript animations and UI elements. In pages like these, there will be a lot of performance chokepoints or breaking points in a page’s usual rendering. WebReplay has been renamed to Time Travel Debugging since it allows developers to render complex pages and also allow developers to go back in time to see where the performance is being choked.
The Time Travel Debugging is currently a part of the Firefox Web Developer Tools a collection of Dev utilities that can be used by developers to debug their web applications.
1. Install Firefox Nightly on Mac
2. Go to about:config, enable devtools.recordreplay.enabled
3. Open a new tab via Tools > Web Developer > Record Execution
Time Travel debugging is currently under testing so suggests that Time Travel Debugging will be coming to more stable versions of Firefox soon.
Other details are available in the GitHub gist. This is the Bugzilla page where the feature’s progress inside Firefox can be tracked for future updates.
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