We web developers find ourselves fishing through the output of the View Source… menu looking for some little snippet of code like a needle in a haystack. The Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird browsers have a great and little-known feature that makes this job much easier.
Select an area of a web page in one of the Mozilla browsers, and right click on the selection. Choose “View Selection Source…”. This option brings up a view source window showing only the source from the area around your selection, the with exact source of your selection already selected in the View Source window.
Very nice.
Comments
Will - July 21, 2003 9:24 pm
Now that is cool.
Peep this: In Firebird, hold down the ctrl key as if you were going to open a link in a new browser. Now use the scrollwheel on your mouse for some instant text zooming!
Dylan Moreland - July 27, 2003 3:27 am
The best thing about this is that you can view generated output as well from scripts, something that is a pain otherwise (lots of debug code).
Paul Scrivens - August 1, 2003 10:00 pm
Amazing the powerful tools you have hidden under your nose. Thanks for tip.
Anne van Kesteren - August 5, 2003 2:48 pm
I knew it already, but unfortunately there is a bug in it. <br /> gets rendered as <br>, which is the same for every "open-tag".
Gray - January 19, 2005 12:50 pm
Dylan hinted at this but it should be made more clear.
Another fabulous feature with View Selection Source is that Mozilla does not NOT re-GET the page. When you pull down the View menu to Page Source, the page is often refetched -- especially with dynamic content. If you do a select-all and then a view selection source, you will see the HTML that generated the current page.
I've been looking for that feature forever!
Blank - March 1, 2006 4:32 pm
There are many bugs in this, it leaves out tags and reorders them compared to other browsers. very hard to do html scraping using view-selection-source!
Bish - October 17, 2007 8:03 am
Who can write me a 'view selected source" modified module for Firefox? Serious responses only
Sadie - October 16, 2008 8:06 am
I don't have the view selected source option in my right-click menu. I have Firefox v. 3.0.3, and I wonder if any of my add-ons have gotten in the way?
Mike Gauthier - January 13, 2009 10:47 am
Sadie, I have FF 3.0.5 and it works just fine. You have to select text on a webpage first for it to work.