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Saying Goodbye to Firebug

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111–120 of 157 posts

Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug

#111
post #8

Firebug didn't just raise the bar for web debugging, it pretty much raised the bar for all debugging tools. It leaves a great legacy with the built-in dev tools. Great project.

Whoa. That's pretty hyperbolic. Firebug is definitely cool but things like SoftICE or the Visual Studio debugger were amazing.

Huh, I've never heard of either of those.

Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug

#113

"The story of Firefox and Firebug is synonymous with the rise of the web. We fought the good fight and changed how developers inspect HTML and debug JS in the browser. Firebug ushered in the Web 2.0 era. " I love, used and appreciate firebug as much as the next guy but this is a bit much. Its a great product that helped alot of people it's not an ideal to fight for nor "ushered" in web 2.0.

Do you not remember what it was like in the years (nearly decades) prior to firebug? alert() still gives me nightmares. Firebug was easily as huge as AJAX, ES6, and other such milestones.

Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug

#114
post #39

I guess this is the right place to point out to people reminiscing that if you open Firefox dev tools and click the options cog, you can select a Firebug theme.

Not the same thing... The Firefox dev tools' Firebug theme gives me the illusion that I can click the network tab and find that old, reassuring interface. And instead it's the (in my opinion) less functional one from dev tools. At that point, I prefer ditching the Firebug theme altogether, and embrace the loss. :(

I did that, but I'm not seeing the same functionality. It seems to just be a skin.

Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug

#115
post #36

I miss Firebug for one simple reason: It detached from the browser window as a singular window that provided developer functions to all of your browser tabs. In modern Firefox and Chrome, each tab has its own distinct developer tools panel that can be detached as a separate window for the operating system's window manager to handle. Firebug's behavior was somewhat analogous to "MDI" in legacy GUI applications, in tha…

I hate juggling dev tools, opening, resizing, detaching them one by one, for each tab. It fucking sucks.

Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug

#116
Opera used to have its own debugging/inspection tool[1] as well. It was released in 2008, it was open-source[2] (unlike the browser), didn't required plugins like firebug at the time, had handy remote debugging, overall I enjoyed it the most. But it died with the browser. Honestly, I'm surprised it's still up somewhere.

1. https://www.opera.com/dragonfly/

2. https://github.com/operasoftware/dragonfly

Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug

#117
post #49

Firebug didn't just raise the bar for web debugging, it pretty much raised the bar for all debugging tools. It leaves a great legacy with the built-in dev tools. Great project.

I often argue that Firebug is the reason Firefox is still around. It was easier to develop on Firefox and then debug on IE. So a lot of websites worked on Firefox even if the management team didn't care (or even, in our case, when they told us not to support Firefox and we nodded and did it anyway)

> or even, in our case, when they told us not to support Firefox and we nodded and did it anyway

The same happened to me at one particularly bad place I worked. Even more amusing is that we we're writing a web crawler based product and without inspecting the crawled sites in firebug our product wouldn't have existed at all.

Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug

#118
post #16

Firebug was the greatest thing to happen to web development. Honestly I still prefer it to the native dev tools. I especially love how most things go to the console so I don't have to jump all over the place to find the information I'm looking for. I absolutely abhor the network panel in Chrome. It's like they're purposefully trying to make it difficult.

I noticed in recent firefox-dev you can now expand XHR requests directly in the console which then pops up a mini network panel. I don't know how long it's been there, I noticed it today but I might have simply had XHR logging off previously.

I just noticed that this week as well, although like you I have no idea how long it's been there. Pretty nifty little feature.

Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug

#119
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebRender is coming but absolutely isn’t ready yet; it’s not even turned on by default in Nightly (although I use it on my home machine and it’s getting a very good very quickly).

And there is no integrated Firebug - just replacement.

> The good news is that all the capabilities of Firebug are now present in current Firefox Developer Tools.

> Firebug 3 ... was built as an extension to built-in Firefox devtools and eventually integrated directly into devtools.

Re: Saying Goodbye to Firebug

#120

When 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.

My memory might be way off base here, but I'm fairly sure Chrome Dev Tools were in a reasonable state by 2012. Screenshots from the time certainly suggest so. My experience is much the opposite, in that it was around 2012 or so that I probably stopped installing Firefox on my dev machines altogether.

That said, recent features in Firefox (Containers especially) have me much more interested again.

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