Wirebrowser
A JavaScript debugger with breakpoint-driven heap search
Details
- External ID
- 46218101
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Wirebrowser
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Dec. 10, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 73
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.857824427480916
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN!I'm building a JavaScript debugger called Wirebrowser. It combines network inspection, request rewriting, heap snapshots, and live object search.The main experimental feature is BDHS (Breakpoint-Driven Heap Search): it hooks into the JavaScript debugger and automatically captures a heap snapshot at every pause and performs a targeted search for the value or structure of interest. This reveals the moment a value appears in memory and the user-land function responsible for creating it.Another interesting feature is the Live Object Search: it inspects runtime objects (not just snapshots), supports regex and object similarity, and lets you patch objects directly at runtime.Whitepaper: https://fcavallarin.github.io/wirebrowser/BDHS-Origin-TraceFeedback very welcome, especially on whether BDHS would help your debugging workflow.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche developer utilities and toolchains
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- javascript debugger with heap search
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Building a custom browser or DevTools wrapper is possible, but hooking into the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to automatically trigger, parse, and performantly query multi-hundred-megabyte V8 heap snapshot memory graphs is a complex systems task.
What it would actually take: This requires an Electron or Chromium embedded framework communicating over the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) with custom V8 heap snapshot parsers (often in Rust or C++ via WebAssembly). The hard part is Breakpoint-Driven Heap Search (BDHS): taking instantaneous heap snapshots without causing catastrophic UI freezes, streaming the snapshot, and executing fast graph-traversal queries across millions of heap nodes and edges to isolate state changes between breakpoints.
Discussion
15 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Replay.io time-travel debugger, DomLoggerpp for monitoring JS sinks, domdig for browser security, Chrome DevTools, Burp Suite
Concerns raised: Crashes on large memory objects and huge blobs of code, Handling very large base64 strings and WS messages, Lacks true time-travel debugging capabilities, Dense documentation, needs clearer visual introduction
Feature requests: Video demo prominently placed at top of page, Better handling of large memory objects, Support for hardware breakpoints and execution rewinding
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 62 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #7 of 63 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 29 days after the earliest competitor.
- heapspace · github · 2026-09-28 · 83 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Bloodhound · hn · 2025-12-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- midden · github · 2026-09-25 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- I built a post-mortem debugger for native Windows x64/x86 crashes · hn · 2026-09-23 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- InspectBetter · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Dev Inspector · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Pathetic · hn · 2026-05-05 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- I built a small browser engine from scratch in C++ · hn · 2026-01-28 · 146 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.