The New Responsive Design Mode Is Awful. Why did it change? Is it justified?

Developer Tools
#1

Let’s just be real for a second… the old responsive design mode was perfect. So why did it get changed?

Can someone justify these decisions for this new design?

I made this video to highlight the problems, and hopefully get the ball rolling on bringing back the old design:

I’m honestly shocked that this industry level of software has taken a downgrade to its function. I’m on the edge of making the switch to Chrome after 10 years of Firefox loyalty.

Please, could someone pretend this is a courtroom and make a case for how the new RDM is better? Because I’m not buying it, and neither are many others.

Please humor us, explain the benefits of the new RDM vs the old.

#2

Thanks for the feedback and thanks for making the video.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to return to the previous version of RDM for technical reasons, so instead we need to work together and improve the new one.

Looking at the issues you mention in your video:

  1. I agree the auto-refreshing is confusing and potentially causes work to be lost if you already spent some time making edits to the page. We plan to offer direct control over the refreshing, so that it will be up to the user whether it happens or not. I believe it’s important to resolve this soon to avoid further confusion. (It’s currently done whenever touch or UA state changes, but if you just want to change size, you likely don’t want any refreshing.) In addition, we plan to persist Inspector changes in the future, so that your work is preserved even if the page does refresh.
  2. The centered window is effectively a design choice in the current version of the tool. On some machines, there seems to be quite a lot of lag, so it’s not very smooth. It does seem like we should make a change here, perhaps returning the left-aligned mode.
  3. Thanks for mentioning the rotate button jumping around. I don’t believe that’s been discussed before. I filed a bug about this. In general, the toolbars in the UI need some more polish, and this is another example of it.
  4. About editing the devices, I agree that would be a nice improvement. You can follow the existing bug for this.
  5. For the white background, this seems like personal preference to me. You can change the tools to the dark theme as one way to get more contrast in your example. Some people might desire a light background instead, so it’s not clear that there’s a single color that’s best in all situations. We’d like to eventually offer better theming support, so that may allow setting a custom color here.

Thanks for your feedback, and please help us work towards something better here if you are able to contribute.

1 Like
#3

Awesome!

Thank you so much for your help and sharing these updates. I’m a fan of what you’re saying.

If this helps, I’ve made some mock-ups today and put together a video to demo how it could look:

Video: https://youtu.be/t9MfQKjHrmc

Images: https://imgur.com/a/hEtdf

Let me know if you need anything, photoshop assets, etc. I’m happy to help with anything I can.

Thanks!