mozilla Firefox 53: JSON Viewer On By Default

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Firefox 53: JSON Viewer On By Default

 

Mozilla plans to enable the built-in JSON Viewer of the Firefox web browser for all browser channels including Firefox Stable in Firefox 53.

 

The organization integrated the viewer in version 44 of the web browser, but did not enable it by default for all channels but the Developer Channel.

 

Firefox's JSON Viewer displays structured JSON data instead of the RAW data dump that one gets when the viewer or a third-party extension is not enabled.

 

Take a look at the following two screenshots to see the difference between unstructured JSON data, barely readable by humans, and the data presented by the JSON Viewer in Firefox.

 

 

 

As you can see, the data is displayed in a tree hierarchy with JSON Viewer enabled. It is still possible to switch to the raw data view with the viewer enabled. Other options that you may find interesting are to show or hide certain bits of data, to use a filter, and to save or copy data.

 

This is mostly useful for developers, as it provides them with a better representation of JSON data directly in the Firefox web browser. Useful for instance to understand how to retrieve information from the data.

 

JSON Viewer is part of all versions of Firefox already, but it is not enabled in all versions. While it is enabled in Firefox Developer Edition and Nightly for instance, it is not enabled in Firefox Stable. This will happen with the release of Firefox 53 which will come out on April 18th, 2017 if the Firefox release schedule is not changed.

 

You can enable JSON Viewer in all versions of Firefox right now if you don't want to wait for that to happen:

1. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and hit the Enter-key.
2. Confirm that you will be careful if the warning prompt appears.
3. Search for devtools.jsonview.enabled.
4. Double-click on the preference name.

Setting the value of the preference to true enables the feature, while a value of false disables it. This means that you can disable the viewer in case you don't require it, or prefer to use a different extension or program for that instead.

 

You can follow the progress on Bugzilla. (via Sören Hentzschel)

 

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