Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#1

Post by memorable » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 8:37 AM UTC

Thank You, Firebug (2017)
getfirebug.com

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#2

Post by moasda » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 10:37 AM UTC

For me, Firebug was a game changer in web development. It has set a new standard.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#3

Post by ZiiS » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 10:44 AM UTC

I genuinely wonder if Flash/Silverlight would have won without this single tool.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#4

Post by mongol » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 10:54 AM UTC

moasda wrote: post #2

For me, Firebug was a game changer in web development. It has set a new standard.

For sure. I think Firebug, Gmail and Google Maps are approximately of the same age and they all opened up a new era, showing the way to a more modern web. I am unsure if the Web 2.0 moniker applies to what happened around this time but I think it was around then too.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#5

Post by zegl » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 10:57 AM UTC

Firebug was a game-changer when I discovered it back in 2008 or so. I wasn't a particularly good developer then, and the complete lack of debugging tools made it even worse: alert("this thing happened!") was literally the only way to debug anything (that I knew of anyway).

Afterwards, IIRC, Microsoft released a debugger for IE built into Visual Studio, and later both IE and Chrome followed Firebugs footsteps.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#6

Post by daemond » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 11:11 AM UTC

There are still people paying tribute to it by stars. https://ossinsight.io/analyze/firebug/firebug

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#7

Post by dry_soup » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 11:35 AM UTC

Firebug is what made HTML, CSS, and JS click for me. Seeing a website interactively update as you made changes, as well as inspecting existing websites to see how they worked made all those concepts so much easier to grasp.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#8

Post by rootsudo » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 11:42 AM UTC

modifying client side code was great fun.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#9

Post by GuB-42 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 11:42 AM UTC

ZiiS wrote: post #3

I genuinely wonder if Flash/Silverlight would have won without this single tool.

I think Flash lost because it shot itself in the foot, Firebug or not.

Flash was way beyond the web stack of that time in pretty much every aspect, and it would still have some advantages even today if it was still supported.

But Adobe completely dropped the ball. The plugin was a buggy mess, which regularly topped the charts in term of vulnerabilities and accessibility was pretty bad, all fixable problems they didn't fix. Adobe also didn't work with browser vendors and web standardization bodies to improve integration, instead relying on the already obsolete nsapi. Browsers kept nsapi support just for Flash, but as some point, enough is enough. I believe that with a bit more care from Adobe, Flash could have been part of the web standards, and I think it would have been better that what we have now.

I don't know much about Silverlight but it looks like a Flash knockoff that didn't fix any of the core issue Flash had.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#10

Post by glenjamin » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 11:47 AM UTC

Firebug was some truly excellent work - but I think it's worth also mentionining its precursor Venkman - which in turn built upon the js/jsd low-level debugging APIs inside the mozilla suite.

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/

edit: there's a nice write-up of how firebug got started here https://flailingmonkey.com/the-history-of-firebug