What is Joe Hewitt doing now?
Saying Goodbye to Firebug
81–90 of 157 posts
Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug
#82What is Joe Hewitt doing now?
His Github seems pretty active:
https://github.com/joehewitt
Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug
#83Things instantly became real when firebug for IE came out. To me that one tool made a front end web development career a viable option. Do y'all remember JS before Firebug? ouch
> Do y'all remember JS before Firebug? ouch
Most people debugged with alerts or document.write-ing in the page. The "wokest" were aware of Venkman (Moz/FF), Script Editor (IE) and the Visual Studio IE integration (also IE), all of which were pretty much just JS debuggers.
Venkman worked the best but the UX was a horrendous mess, SE and VS were less visually messy but (likely due to IE) frequently got lost entirely and were completely unable to debug the JS toplevel ("and "modules" were not really a thing back then, so much of your code would live in the JS toplevel).
This was also the epoch of Drip, an IE webview which would just reload a page over and over checking for IE's infamous DOM leaks.
God I so don't miss it.
Firebug was definitely a pivotal moment, a complete perspective shift for the field.
Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug
#84I'm really concerned about how much weaker the new WebExtensions API than the previous extensions API. Just today I saw (and submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15542316 ) an interesting article about Keysnail, an amazing extension which is impossible to turn into a WebExtension — all because WebExtensions (apparently) forbids overriding C-n despite allowing override of other key sequences. I'm very conce…
Given that webextensions are not just a firefox thing: HN's probably the wrong place to voice that particular concern? We're losing a number of sweet addons with the switch to web extensions in Firefox specifically, but in terms of cross-browser gains, web extensions rather than "these things only work in this one browser" still seems the right way forward, and it's just another web spec so if we need more out of it, let's get the attention of the people who draft that spec and get them to given more access to the things we need to bring back the functions that made life better.
Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug
#85I remember using Firebug for the first time: it was polished from the very beginning, not feeling like an early release at all.
Had enough added value to be a commercial tool, but it was released for free. For that, kudos.
Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, SoftICE, I remember buying Hackerzvoice (a French newspaper-like hacking magazine) which included SoftICE tutorials on how to crack WinRAR license verification. (for educational purposes of course) I was amazed that I could breakpoint and debug any running app. I miss SoftICE. I read this a while back from someone who work for the company which owns SoftICE copyright : https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.c…
Any idea what people use now instead of softice?
Ollydbg on 32 bit windows
x64dbg on 64 bit windows
IDA Pro Debugger/GDB/LLDB on Linux/OSX/iOS/Android
GDB everywhere else
as StillBored said, windbg for Windows kernel debugging, but I've honestly only used it in exotic situations for .NET debugging
Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug
#87When I started out as a web developer 5 years ago, one of the prime reasons for choosing FF over chrome was Firebug.
As a beginner, it made debugging so much easier. Five years later, I still cant fathom using anything but Firefox, alas, without firebug.
Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a very capable javascript debugger as a mozilla plugin (don't think it was an addon), years before firebug/browsers dev tools had one. It don't remember the name, it was something with a V.
Venkman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venkman
Firebug was neither the first for step-by-step JS debugging, nor for poking at the DOM. Those two things were within the purview of Venkman—the original Mozilla JS debugger—and the DOM Inspector—Firebug's predecessor created in 2001 by Joe Hewitt, an ex-Netscape/AOL employee and the original author of Firebug itself. Honza's timeline is off. I've left a note in the blog comments about this.
Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug
#89Wow.. feels like a legendary player is retiring .. Thank you for changing the game Firebug. #hallOfFame
Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug
#90Does anyone know the history of the `console` object? The first time I ever saw it and used it was with Firebug, but it occurs to me that I don't know if Firebug invented it. Did it just decide to inject this name into the global namespace? And having it become a common API across multiple JS environments was due to its popularity in Firebug? Or was it somehow already in JS and I just wasn't aware of it up until that…
I remember we had to check for its existence before using it, monkeypatching it to noop if not found.