Firebug 1.12 – New Features

fletchowns 12 years ago |

Love the new features. I still find myself using Firebug over the built in dev tools in either Chrome or Firefox. The Firebug team has done a really tremendous job over the years. Keep up the good work!

illumen 12 years ago | |

Yeah, firebug still has quite a lot of polish compared to the others.

Perhaps it has to do with the contributors being expert UI developers, and firebug developers second. Whereas the other tools are mostly developed by employees who do full time dev tool development, but not so much work using the tools.

But I know others mostly prefer chrome tools. The same people often get stuck in firebug or in IE dev tools.

Anyway... GREAT WORK FIREBUG TEAM! xo

dubcanada 12 years ago | | |

I fail to see how Firebug has a better UI then WebKit Developer Tools?

As far as I am concerned they are the same in that regard. And since both of those tools are not built by "developers", but by "frontend engineers" it doesn't really matter.

I spent like 15 minutes trying to figure out how to attach Firebug to the browser window. Only to find out that the upward pointing arrow in a gray circle means attach to browser window. On WebKit I click an icon that looks like a browser window with developer tools.

The resources tab in WebKit is ten times better then the mishmash of CSS/Script/Net/Cookies tabs all spread out.

Anyways that is just my opinion, and as far as I am concerned Dragonfly was the best.

yogo 12 years ago | | |

I guess it comes down to personal preference but I've always thought Firebug beats Elements and Resources in Chrome. It is much faster to filter with tabs than digging through a tree IMO.

actionscripted 12 years ago | | |

Think what s/he's saying is that it helps that they use their own tools for UI dev versus those who hammer on the browser and made comparable tools, not that Firebug has a better UI.

dubcanada 12 years ago | | |

That's fine, but I think it's a bit far fetched to say that the people who work on WebKit/Blink developer tools don't use the developer tools.

paulirish 12 years ago | | |

It's true.. the Chrome DevTools are a webapp, and the engineers behind it use the DevTools _on_ the DevTools as their primary means of development. (Enter inception joke here). From what I can tell, the same is true with the Safari Inspector and the IE F12 Tools.

mh- 12 years ago | |

I think Firebug is superior to the CDT, but unfortunately Firefox is terrible on modern Macs- especially with HiDPI.

sbarre 12 years ago |

"Copy as cURL" is great! I'm curious to see if it even builds POST requests properly..

Edit: it does! It includes all the headers, the POST data, etc...

JonnieCache 12 years ago | |

Even the cookies. It's been in webkit for a while. SO USEFUL.

You can also use it to leech stuff from login/captcha protected download areas like rapidshare or the apple dev center. No more failed browser downloads of 1gig files! Just add -C to your curl command!

sbarre 12 years ago | | |

I think it's actually "-C -" to tell it to automatically figure out where to restart.

tmister 12 years ago | |

Well Chrome had this feature for a long time. Personally I don't find it much useful. But to me the killer feature of firebug is that when you open an XHR entry in new tab it opens the tab with all POST variables. Super handy when debugging REST api.

sbarre 12 years ago | | |

I don't know that this is in regular Chrome (at least I can't find it). Google-fu says that Chromium has it though..

paulirish 12 years ago | | |

Yup it's in regular Chrome: https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/ne...

thejosh 12 years ago | | |

It's in Chrome for Linux and Windows for me.

http://i.imgur.com/42D59mv.png

mh- 12 years ago | |

"Copy as cURL" is pretty much the greatest addition to web dev/debugging since I started like 15 years ago..

mnarayan01 12 years ago |

The list of improvements might be the most exciting I've ever seen for any software, ever. Seriously...great work!

rmccue 12 years ago |

Very annoyingly, in the FF 24 beta, Firebug basically crashes the browser every time you open it (or switch to another tab and then back). Not sure if it's FF's problem or Firebug's, but it's really annoying.

simonlindholm 12 years ago | |

Firefox's, certainly. It would be good if you reported it on Bugzilla.

rmccue 12 years ago | | |

Thanks, I had meant to ping someone about this, but keep forgetting. Filed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=908174

Dylan16807 12 years ago | | |

Interesting, you don't have lag when first opening it? I was investigating pretty much the same thing yesterday, in the end my problem was that the JSD was ridiculously slow to toggle, but firebug is already working to move to JSD2 so I can't really complain too much. There is a test extension you can use attached to this bug.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=815603

I was getting something like 100ms to pause and 10000ms to unpause. With 5 tabs loaded and a couple hundred tabs unloaded. I disabled the javascript parts of firebug for general use, which does avoid the problem most of the time.

rmccue 12 years ago | | |

Aha, you're right! Disabling the Script tab helps immensely. It's a shame since I need the Script tab for a lot of work, but it's not too much of a pain to disable/reenable.

Achshar 12 years ago | | |

How do you know for sure?

simonlindholm 12 years ago | | |

Crashes and slowness that vary with Firefox versions is Firefox's fault, and in this case the note about tab switching points pretty clearly to a problem with the debugger service.

AndrewDucker 12 years ago |

Is there work going on to build Firebug on top of the built-in Firefox debugging tools?

The two don't seem to work well together at the moment.

mnemonik 12 years ago | |

When you enter debug mode in SpiderMonkey most (all? I forget) jit'ing and optimizations won't happen; code becomes a lot slower. The new debugging api allows you to debug specific tabs, while the old one would force all of the browser (including the chrome js that handles the browser's UI) to enter debug mode and the whole browser gets slow.

Because Honza is working on porting firebug to the new debugger API, it will get faster, and so will all of firefox when you are using firebug.

IIRC, Honza is not just working on porting from the old api to the new one, but also on top of our remote debugging protocol. This means that we improve the debugging server, and both the native tools and firebug get better. Plus, you'll be able to use firebug on your laptop, connected remotely to firefox on your android phone, or firefox os.

simonlindholm 12 years ago | |

Not really, no. There was some talk about adding a Firebug panel to the built-in tools, but nothing has really come from it, and any deeper UI integration is probably out of the question for being too much work. But suggestions about how to make it better are still welcome, of course.

The main thing we have gotten out of the new devtools are new cool APIs, e.g. for debugging, paint flashing, CSS auto-completion, profiling (though we haven't gotten around to using most of them yet).

SebastianZ83 12 years ago | | |

For everyone interested, the issue related to the built-in tools integration can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=6320

AndrewDucker 12 years ago | | |

Aaah, so the idea is that you'll be two different UIs built on the same APIs?

That makes sense.

instakill 12 years ago |

I don't know if it's just on my machine but I prefer the built-in tools for a quick debug because FB is so damn slow.

itsbits 12 years ago |

I worked in Firebug for sometime but since Chrome came up with WebKit tools I never looked back,...

talles 12 years ago |

What a great release, it's hard to tell with new feature I liked more :)

chadscira 12 years ago |

But does it support blackboxing? - (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaFBvItTJrE)

SebastianZ83 12 years ago | |

Not yet, though it's something I suggested some time ago: http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=4888. Let's see if we can get that for the next version.

anaphor 12 years ago |

Great, that seems to have fixed several bugs I've been encountering as well (if I switched tabs the firebug UI would disappear).

ghostdiver 12 years ago |

I only miss those two features

  - Pretty print
  - Hot code replace