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Wow, i almost forgot about Firebug. From my point of view it was really a game changer. The first time debugging and understanding web-applications became accessible. Probably all browser dev tools were inspired by this tool
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.
I genuinely wonder if Flash/Silverlight would have won without this single tool.
You get the feeling that Apple wasn't going to support Adobe's Flash plugin on the iPhone, no matter what. Too battery-inefficient, too laden with security holes. They weren't going to pour billions into the iPhone just to have it be a delivery mechanism for Adobe's mess of a runtime.
I see three alternate histories:
1. The iPhone launches without Flash, and it flops, because most of the Alexa top 500 is totally reliant on Flash.
2. The iPhone launches without Flash, just like in our timeline, and it's good enough that people still embrace it. Eventually this kills off Flash just like in our timeline, but it's a slower and more painful transition.
3. Apple agrees to support Flash on the iPhone, but only via an agreement with Adobe that lets Apple develop their own (safer, performant) Flash layer that stays in sync with Adobe's plugin via legally binding terms of the contract or whatever.
In two out of these three alternate histories, we're still stuck with Flash today.
Internet Explorer 6 also had the Microsoft created IE Dev Toolbar that came out around the same time as Firebug (I think it was 6 months after?). It really was a powerful tool, but somehow not really well known in the dev world at that time. I'm really sad that Microsoft put all thier eggs in the Chrome/Chromium basket, instead of continuing thier own engine, or supporting Firefox.
The first web inspector that I used was Xyle Scope in 2004. It was an early tool based on Apple's new Safari engine. It was a few years before Firebug was released, and even then it took a while for Firebug to beat Xyle Scope in features.
I still have the lingering feeling that Xyle Scope's UI was better at directly inspecting HTML and CSS than our current tools. Although that maybe the haze of nostalgia. I found it hard to find any really good screen shots but here is one:
https://taoofmac.com/space/apps/xyle_scope
Of course, FireBug and its successors do so much more than just HTML/CSS inspection. I would often jump between Firebug and Xyle Scope. Eventually, Cultured Code the developers for Xyle Scope focused their talents on creating their Things task manager.
Wow, i almost forgot about Firebug. From my point of view it was really a game changer. The first time debugging and understanding web-applications became accessible. Probably all browser dev tools were inspired by this tool
Joe Hewitt begat DOM Inspector[1], which, after Hewitt left Netscape, begat Firebug (originally "FireBug"), and then pretty much every other Web developer tool began as an attempt to create something that could compete with what was available in the Mozilla ecosystem.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOM_Inspector
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20060419170530/http://www.joehew...
Don't remember if it was built in or not. Anyone remember what it was called?
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'…