Dudes/Dudettes, Chrome rocks as the FlexBuilder debug browser.
I use FireFox as my system’s default browser mainly because of the vast selection of extensions that are available. But I don’t want to use FireFox for debugging because how often does it end up crashing your browser. Now you have all those tabs to reload.
Before Chrome I used IE for debugging because it could crash all it wants without screwing anything else up. On the downside, it’s a tad slow starting up.
Chrome starts up fast, very fast. I’d estimate that IE took about 3-5 seconds to launch and get going every time I previewed my Flex app. Chrome gets there in about 1 second.
Setup
To make Chrome your default External Web Browser in FlexBuilder just go to Window -> Preferences… And then open up General and select Web Browser – just like you see in the image above. In my case I had to click the New… button to add Chrome to the list.
Note: you need to add the -sandbox to the Parameters field. You can read more about why that’s needed here.
Now you need to make sure that you have the debug player installed for Chrome. It seems that Chrome picks up whatever player FireFox uses. So if you have the Flash Player debug version for FireFox then you should be good to go. I didn’t because I don’t like using the debug player for my general browsing – because I don’t want to see everyone’s runtime errors. :-)
If you need the debug player then go to the Adobe Flash Player Support Center. When I installed it I ended up with the debug player running in Chrome and FireFox. That’s good and bad. Now I need to get rid of the debug player running in FireFox. I found a blog post by Fabio Varesano at varesano.net that helped out. He needed to install the Flash Player on a machine where he didn’t have administrator rights to do so and found a sweet workaround. His solution worked great for me because if I installed the regular Flash Player for FireFox it would remove it for Chrome as well.
Here’s what I did:
- Download the XPI archive of the Flash Player Plugin - you may need to right-click and save as to download
- Rename the file from flashplayer-win.xpi to flashplayer-win.zip and then unzip the file
- Now copy the flashplayer.xpt and NPSWF32.dll files into your FireFox plugins folder – which should be in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Plugins\. It turns out that I didn’t have plugins folder for FireFox so I made one. My path eneded up being: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Plugins
Once I copied those two files into that folder and restarted FireFox I had the regular Flash Player running in FireFox and the debug Flash Player running in Chrome. Just what I wanted.
Now I can debug faster than ever. Which is good because I have to do lots of debugging of my shitty-code. :-)
I’m curious why you’d bother with this? Maybe it launches faster? Your clients don’t expect you do deliver on Chrome? I’m very attracted to it’s lightness, but the downside is that it’s also “lite”… fails to have some pretty critical features one gets accustomed to having in a browser.
@Phillip, you know, for a debug browser about the only feature I need is to be able to close it. :-)
I agree though that Chrome is a little toooooo lite. Maybe they should trade names with Adobe. We can have Google AIR and Adobe Chrome. How’s that work for you?
Thanks for the tip on this!
I really enjoy using Chrome for browsing but I always have a slow down issue when using the Mouse Wheel to scroll while there is multiple Flex/Flash content on the page… it seems to slow down the browser and I have to wait a few seconds to do anything. Have you noticed this?
@Ryguy, I haven’t used Chrome much at all. I like it that it’s quick which makes it good for debugging but I find it a bit lacking for general browsing. I’m really hooked on my FireFox extensions.
I agree. Chrome rulz!
After spending hours trying to get Internet Explorer and Flex Builder to cooperate, I've relegated myself to using Chrome, too, for debugging.
Like you, I've always kept my main FireFox installation for browsing with all my addones, and kept only the release version of the player on it. And I used IE for debugging…
Thanks for the tips.
BTW, For my machine, Windows, running Firefox 3.0, my plugins directory was at:
C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxplugins. Just in case anyone else tries this.
And for those who are asking why Chrome is useful, I believe it's the process isolation of tabs and the runtime environment of all thest Web 2.0 apps. Right now, I'm having some stability issues in Firefox, and I don't know if it's because of some Javascript running on a site, or one of the 20 plug-ins I require daily.
And like polyGeek, at at least now have a reliable Flash debug environment totally isolated from everything else.
@todd, keep an eye on Chromes cache. I've found that sometimes it just starts showing me the cached version of a SWF and won't let it go until I clear the cache. I wrote this little AIR app to fix that problem.