Some people asked me about what makes Groundspeed different from other Firefox addons like Firebug or the Web Developer Extension.

While both of these tools allow you to manipulate the DOM structure of the page loaded in the browser, they were not designed for manipulating the user interface elements for the purpose of pentest and as a consequence they require more effort to use.

Manipulating the user interface using Groundspeed requires less cognitive tasks (reading through source code, navigating a tree structure, etc.) and manipulation tasks (clicking, switching tabs, windows, etc) than doing the same thing using Firebug or the Web Developer extension.

One of the arguments I made in the OWASP presentation is that these “extra” tasks finish up having a high “cost” for the tester when you consider that you have to repeat them a lot. They distract the tester, they do not contribute to the goal of the test and they are annoying. You can think of them as some sort of “test friction”.

Groundspeed is a tool designed for a very specific task while Firebug and the Web Developer extension are very powerful tools designed to solve a broad range of problems. If you think of them as chainsaws, it’s true that you can use them to open your mail… but for that specific task, maybe it makes more sense to use a letter opener (specially if you want to keep all your fingers).