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Firebug

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21–30 of 84 posts

Re: Firebug

#21
post #20

I feel Firebug is one of those developer tools that would have been highly monetized in the current start era. I owe a lot of my own career path as a Web software engineer to Firebug.

I learned CSS with firebug, before that I had no clue what CSS was when it first came out in daily use

I learnt CSS long before Firebug. Which means that still to this day, I’m vaguely paranoid that I’m underutilizing Firebug (or its successor dev tools) when I write CSS. The interactive model Firebug exposes just never clicked for me. I feel like said model is maybe more easily-absorbed when you’re starting from scratch, and don’t have the “iterate by editing the CSS file and refreshing the page” model burned into your muscle memory.

Are there any video tutorials someone could recommend, where a proficient user of the dev tools uses them to interactively develop and tweak the design of a web-app?

Re: Firebug

#22

This reminds me of two other now-obsolete web debugging tools. Weinre[1] let you to view the DOM, network requests, and console output when testing sites on a phone. Aardwolf[2] provided an interactive JavaScript debugger, by rewriting the code to add debug hooks. [1] http://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/docs/latest/ [2] https://github.com/lexandera/Aardwolf

Is there consensus on what to use instead of weinre these days? I have mobile-only issues with my web apps rarely enough that I feel like I always have to start searching from scratch to find a remote debugging tool.

Re: Firebug

#23

This reminds me of two other now-obsolete web debugging tools. Weinre[1] let you to view the DOM, network requests, and console output when testing sites on a phone. Aardwolf[2] provided an interactive JavaScript debugger, by rewriting the code to add debug hooks. [1] http://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/docs/latest/ [2] https://github.com/lexandera/Aardwolf

Is there consensus on what to use instead of weinre these days? I have mobile-only issues with my web apps rarely enough that I feel like I always have to start searching from scratch to find a remote debugging tool.

Both chrome and Firefox support debugging their mobile android versions from their desktop versions.

I'm sure safari offers the same for iOS.

Re: Firebug

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there consensus on what to use instead of weinre these days? I have mobile-only issues with my web apps rarely enough that I feel like I always have to start searching from scratch to find a remote debugging tool.

Both chrome and Firefox support debugging their mobile android versions from their desktop versions. I'm sure safari offers the same for iOS.

    I'm sure safari offers the same for iOS.
Indeed it does! Been quite a while since I used it, but I do remember it being quite seamless and enjoyable.

https://www.browserstack.com/guide/how-to-debug-on-iphone

Re: Firebug

#25
post #21
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned CSS with firebug, before that I had no clue what CSS was when it first came out in daily use

I learnt CSS long before Firebug. Which means that still to this day, I’m vaguely paranoid that I’m underutilizing Firebug (or its successor dev tools) when I write CSS. The interactive model Firebug exposes just never clicked for me. I feel like said model is maybe more easily-absorbed when you’re starting from scratch, and don’t have the “iterate by editing the CSS file and refreshing the page” model burned into yo…

I don't think there's too much to learn there; it's not really a different model at all.

You're still writing your CSS in your text editor like normal.

1. Via the debugger you can tweak styles and see feedback in real time. It's just a much faster feedback loop than refreshing the page every time. Then you cut and paste (or save as...) to get the changes back into your source code.

2. You can debug styles. If you are wondering why a particular bit of text is green and bold, it will show you what line of CSS it's inheriting each property from. (And which styles have been overridden)

Re: Firebug

#26
Does anyone know a trick how to get Firebug or similar running directly on iOS? I know that you can connect the iOS device to your Mac and run the developer tools on the big machine.

What I’m looking for is having Firebug directly running on the mobile device.

Re: Firebug

#27
post #14

Confused. I thought Firebug is no longer needed because the functionality is part of Firefox developer tools, which have been always visible in Firefox for years (at least in many Linux distros, maybe that's not a Mozilla default?). The site mentions Firefox Developer Edition. What is that? A quick search seems to indicate that it's just one version ahead of Beta, what was called Aurora in the past. Certainly if you…

> The site mentions Firefox Developer Edition. What is that? A quick search seems to indicate that it's just one version ahead of Beta, what was called Aurora in the past.

> Certainly if you want to test new features that's good. But what is the benefit for general Web development?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8583747

In short, separate profile, quicker access to new developer tools/new web standard implementations by virtue of being its own release channel (as you mention), developer-friendly defaults.

Re: Firebug

#29
I used Firebug even after Firefox added devtools and Firebug stopped it's development. It truly shows how powerful XPI add-ons really were. I still stick with Firefox and the dev tools are quite good, and features like flexbox and don't helpers are quite useful.

Re: Firebug

#30

Firebug, along with web developer toolbar, changed everything for me. I learnt web development on IE6 by editing html in notepad. I switched to Firefox for tabbed browsing and because it was faster. When I discovered firebug I almost couldn't believe it. What the hell had I been doing up to this point? Why doesn't everyone know about this? Later I discovered that Chrome had it built in and still most web devs hadn't…

Same. I remember what an epiphany Firebug was, and I felt bittersweet later when quality dev tools started being built-in, just because it seemed a little sad to think Firebug wasn’t going to be needed anymore.
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