A recent attempt to bring up an element in Firefox's inspector by right-clicking the element and selecting the appropriate menu item resulted in the fans on my machine spinning up and the process needing to be killed after it appeared to hang and started chewing through RAM. All in response to my attempt to get a relatively simple view of the DOM tree on the screen to interact with.

When I tried it again I observed an increase of 130MB RAM to bring up the initial window/view, along with noticeable lag to put its contents on screen and make the controls interactive. When I collapsed all the nodes so that the only nodes in the tree toggled open were the HTML body element and its ancestors, it ended up consuming 400MB more—to collapse tree nodes and show fewer things on the screen.

That's half a gigabyte to bring up a less usable tool than the original DOM Inspector that Joe Hewitt checked in to the mozilla.org CVS server back in 2001.

The fact that Firefox's devtools team has ignored the readily available information and guidance from Firefox's own repo about how to do large JS codebases because they instead favor doing a wholesale import all of the bad practices from the NodeJS/NPM world is a serious problem unto itself.