How in God's name did I only just find out about this?

[jducoeur]

As part of my aforementioned looking into the state of the art in Javascript, I found that one of the pages I was digging through was absolutely insistent that the most important single tool to have is Firebug. So I went and installed that about half an hour ago, and have been playing with it since.

Oh, god -- I think I'm in love. I mean, full-blown, serious techie crush. It is not often that I pay the shareware fee for a package before actually using it for something, but man: this one's a no-brainer.

It's essentially the Web debugger I've always needed. Granted, it mainly works in Firefox, but that's at least half the battle. It appears to do everything I can think of, right out of the box, from Javascript breakpointing to network traffic monitoring to deep DOM inspection, all with a UI that's remarkably clean and easy to use. I've used a lot of the half-assed plugins that are out there, and this makes most of them look like stone knives and bearskins.

Maybe everyone else has already found this, and I'm simply the last to the party, but if not, and you do Web development: go download this. And pay the shareware donation. This is a project well worth supporting...

Comments

[asim.livejournal.com]

I do love Firebug, indeed. I actually put in a request for more memory on the basis of running Firefox/Firebug parallel to Visual Studio...

[fitzw.livejournal.com]

I installed it, and didn't know what I had for a couple of weeks afterward, until I was having a problem with a web application that I was developing that used client-side javascript (most of the pages use server-side javascript). After that, I installed it on all of the other machines that I use (except the Gentoo box -- I'm a little behind on plugins for that machine).

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I found it about 9 months ago -- whenever the last BarCamp was -- and I've been a diehard fan ever since. I can't recommend Firebug highly enough.

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

Yea firebug is totally great, I do wish a few features were a bit easier to get to. The dom events tracking is kind of hidden. Plus an IE version would be helpful.

Also the console.log() method is great.

[jducoeur]

Note that they've got a sort of lightweight IE version now; haven't tried it yet, but it's advertised on the site. I gather that it's not as good as the Firebug version, but may be worth checking out.

It could certainly be done right in IE, but I don't blame them for not biting it off. I know from experience that it would be pretty much a complete rewrite, totally separate from the Firefox codebase -- IE provides almost as much hookability as Firefox, but the style and approach is *totally* different. They're probably need to hire separate programmers, because the skill set is so different. And some aspects (such as the Javascript debugger) are probably much harder, maybe impossible...

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

I expect you are right, and that it would not be worth their effort. However there have been days where it would have been very useful.