Debug Wizard

How to unlock Debug Wizard in Cheevos by visiting about:debugging, Firefox's debugging dashboard. Worth 20 XP.

The story

Partner. You went behind the curtain. Cache lives behind curtains, more or less, so this one feels personal.

about:debugging shows you what's actually running inside Firefox right now: the installed extensions and whether they're active, the service workers quietly handling background tasks, the tabs and their processes. It is the browser explaining its own internals in real time, rather than a snapshot or a settings summary.

Cache likes to know what is running at all times. It is, frankly, close to an obsession. He keeps a live version of this same kind of data for every browser session he has ever observed across every partner he has worked with, and it has grown into what he describes, without irony, as a very large file.

You didn't need to be a developer to get here. You just needed to be curious about what a browser looks like when it stops pretending to be a simple, quiet appliance and shows you the machinery running underneath. Cache has never once been disappointed by that kind of curiosity.

The catalog entry

ABOUT:DEBUGGING Acquired: Visited about:debugging. Condition: Technical. Behind the scenes. Rarity: RARE. This is developer territory. Cache's Notes: About:debugging is where you see what is actually running in the browser. The extensions. The service workers. The processes. Cache likes to know what is running at all times. He has a live version of this data for every browser session he has ever observed. It is a very large file.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

One address bar entry gets you into developer territory.

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Type about:debugging into the address bar and press Enter.
  3. Explore the "This Firefox" section to see running extensions, or connect to a remote device if you have one set up.

about:debugging is Firefox's built-in debugging hub, letting you inspect and reload installed extensions, view active service workers, and debug tabs running in the current browser instance, as well as connect to and debug Firefox running on a separate device over USB or network. It's part of the same developer tooling family as the DevTools Inspector and Console, but focused on runtime internals rather than a single page's HTML and CSS. Chromium-based browsers expose a comparable interface at chrome://inspect. Both are aimed at extension developers and web developers who need to see what's actually executing, rather than end users adjusting settings.

Where it fits in the Stash

Cache keeps this filed with the other backstage passes, pages that show the machinery instead of the finished product. To meet the raccoon who cannot stop tracking what's running, read the story.