It’s so weird to me when people use the phrase “fight the good fight (of faith),” without knowing the latter half of the expression or where it comes from.
It makes web debugging sound like a religious struggle.
Thank You, Firebug (2017)
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#52Wow, 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 is the reason Firefox broke IE’s crown. On one project we had management tell us specifically not to support Mozilla. Fuck you man. We get the software running on Mozilla first because it’s the only place we can debug properly. Then we fix whatever IE bugs are left over by dead reconning. We’re still going to be Mozilla first, we just won’t tell you about it anymore. And you just lost some trustworthiness so good luck convincing us of something difficult next time.
I still think the Mozilla team did Firebug a dirty by reimplementing what was an inferior version instead of bringing it home.
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strong disagree. Compared to Venkman, Firebug had the following misfeatures: - modal interface* - bloat - dubious** interface labels, like "DOM" (or whatever) to look at the object's property tree - totally sucked at debugging any part of the Gecko runtime/toolkit code, or anything that wasn't a Web page (including e.g. Firebug's own code) * This is a misfeature that every browser's built-in devtools copied, and it's…
Did we use the same firebug? Why all this vitriol towards it?
I think I just answered that. It's also a piece of software, not a person. The sort of criticism I gave (especially in response to a remark that described another piece of software as "horrendous") is imminently fair game.
As for persons, I like the decisions that Hewitt made when he made DOM Inspector before going on to do Firebug. It was like UNIX pipes (incl. that you can string them together to arbitrary lengths), but with dynamic visual inspectors on each side, instead of bytestreams/text. Firebug was not that. It was one step forward, two steps back.
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#54Internet 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.
Everyone hated IE by then. It was the ex that only tried hard after the breakup had started. It’s too late. Don’t forget your toothbrush.
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#55Firebug was a godsend back in the day. I also used Firebug Lite pretty heavily which was a javascript file you could inject into your website to get a variation of Firebug working in browsers such as IE6
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#56Internet 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.
Yeah, I remember using this to try and debug MS JScript issues. What a headache, it was extremely flaky and would crash if you looked at it wrong.
I think people forget that debuggers used to crash the IDE as a matter of course (and they didn’t auto save as a matter of course).
VisualAge for Java, the precursor for Eclipse, was the first IDE where the debugger was stable. However the editor would just up and crash instead, which is worse. Symantec had the first generally stable IDE in VisualCAFE.
I learned to obsessively type CTRL-S on word processors in college. But that came to adulthood with me because of shit IDEs. I’ve used Jetbrains for more than 15 years. I know it saves when it loses focus. And I still hit save about ten times a day.
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#57I 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'…
Flash is a shining example of the concept, “Faster than Possible”.
When all of the vendors have a similar product, you chose based on feature set and cost (not all costs are monetary). When only one vendor has an interesting feature set, you need to ask yourself why, and it it’s too good to be true.
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flash absolutely would have become more entrenched. 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 flop…
"Too battery-inefficient, too laden with security holes." Lol. The reason Apple didn't support Flash was it was too good. If flash was supported 100% (practically natively) - there would be no point creating native apps in objective C (Flash was a full decade ahead). Flash devs would have coded circles around objective C devs. This could have screwed over the entire ios ecosystem. Once flash was dead and gone: SWIFT!
You definitely don't remember how bad Flash was on mobile. It was a security nightmare, and a battery-drainer.
Flash devs would have coded circles around objective C devs
I don't doubt that there were many talented Flash developers. All the ones I encountered were... not that.
Not that they were bad people, but they were mostly designers new to software dev, slapping together code as fast as possible to make it work.
Also, an interpreted runtime was never going to run circles around native code.
This could have screwed over the entire ios ecosystem
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#59Wow, 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 is the reason Firefox broke IE’s crown. On one project we had management tell us specifically not to support Mozilla. Fuck you man. We get the software running on Mozilla first because it’s the only place we can debug properly. Then we fix whatever IE bugs are left over by dead reconning. We’re still going to be Mozilla first, we just won’t tell you about it anymore. And you just lost some trustworthiness so…
Exactly that. When Mozilla started reimplementing it, it seemed somehow error stack traces started breaking for both firebug and the horrible builtin developer tools
That's when we switched to Chrome for debugging, and only come back to Firefox to debug endless loops and stack overflows (because their Javascript VM is still better at being able to suspend/trace those)
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#60On this topic, and Chrome Dev Tools, does anyone else struggle with getting access to the state of their app?
I find that because of all the encapsulation and transpilation tricks, it’s basically impossible to get a hold of my state or functions in the dev tools during runtime. The best I can do is forcibly set window.state and do a bit of work.
I can set breakpoints and do all that stuff. But I remember back in the bad days when it was pretty easy to “find your app” from the dev tools.
I’m probably doing a poor job describing it, but does anyone else experience this?