Lucas blogged a while ago about some of the initial work on creating a remote debugging system for Firefox on Android. The desktop patches Lucas mentioned have landed, and remote debugging Firefox for Android is now possible.

Remote debugging requires using Desktop Firefox to connect to Mobile Firefox over USB using ADB. Remote debugging is supported in Firefox 15 and newer releases. Here’s a quick guide to getting started:

USB Connection: Connect your Android device running Firefox to a host machine running desktop Firefox using USB. In a terminal, forward the TCP connection using: adb forward tcp:6000 tcp:6000 Firefox Desktop: Use about:config to enable remote debugging. Set the “devtools.debugger.remote-enabled” pref to true. Restart. You should see a “Tools > Web Developer > Remote Debugger” menu. Firefox for Android: Use about:config to enable remote debugging. Set the “devtools.debugger.remote-enabled” pref to true. Restart. Firefox Desktop: Choose “Tools > Web Developer > Remote Debugger” and a Remote Connection dialog should open. If you changed none of the other remote debugger preferences, just use the defaults. Press OK.

Firefox Desktop: You should see an empty debugging window appear. Firefox for Android: You should see a remote debugging connection prompt appear. Press OK to initialize the connection. You have 3 seconds, by default, to accept the connection. You can retry 3 times.

Firefox Desktop: Once the connection is accepted, the empty debugging window will fill with scripts running in the Firefox for Android web page.



Thanks to Lucas, Panos Astithas and the rest of the DevTools team for making this happen. Happy Debugging!