Firebug, the most wanted tool for web developer in the 2000s
Firebug
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: Firebug
#42I remember feeling like a Hacker using Firebug to catch rare shiny Pokemons on poorly designed online Pokemon games through simple edits in 200x
Re: Firebug
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way(s) do you find it inferior?
If you log the contents of an object with firebug and then modify the object later in your script the firebug output does not change. But do the same thing with Firefox and the contents of the object will change. To preserve the object as it was when debugged you have to either copy it or log all the specific properties you're interested in rather than the object as a whole.
Some would probably find that superior to firebug
Re: Firebug
#44Firebug, 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 here. I remember showing Firebug to coworkers and them thinking that I was showing them some kind of wizardry.
Re: Firebug
#45My fondest memory of Firebug is not the javascript tools, but the Flash Debugger tool; FlashFirebug. I used it years ago to reverse engineer a now gone livestreaming website to figure out how it worked in the backend.
I remember the tool. Saved me many times during my heavy Flash development years!
Re: Firebug
#46Thanks, Firebug.
Re: Firebug
#47Still remember that Javascript bug that only occured when Firebug was NOT installed.
Was quite tricky to debug, until it finally clicked. Back then the browser did not have a console.log() function.
Re: Firebug
#48Earlier 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 started writing CSS the same week it was first available in Internet Explorer 3, so "doing it the way you've always done it" isn't really a good excuse.
Being able to click on a value for most things (left, top, width, height, etc) and use the up and down arrow to dynamically move an element around the page, or otherwise tweak anything about it - that's game-changing. If you aren't using the dev tools to tweak your CSS and instead are updating a file and hitting reload, you are way behind in productivity. I'm not even being hyperbolic about this.
You want to know how to do it in 2020? Right-click any element, hopefully it has either a class property or a inline CSS style property, dev tools should open and next to the DOM tree view there should be a CSS panel as well as other panels. Just click around in there, you can edit anything to change the layout instantly, add styles, tweak values. Once you're done tweaking values you can copy and paste the CSS just by selecting it in the dev tools, hit CTRL-C, then paste it into your editor, and then hit reload.
Re: Firebug
#49I used firebug for about ten years, until a new update came out with hardcoded white backgrounds, ignoring the dark system theme we used in a studio.
After my bug was closed wontfix I switched to the then new Firefox dev tools and never used firebug again. White background fascists take note.
Re: Firebug
#50Still remember that Javascript bug that only occured when Firebug was NOT installed. Was quite tricky to debug, until it finally clicked. Back then the browser did not have a console.log() function.
This was still an IE "bug" at least up to 11 IIRC. If you had the console open then `console.*()` worked but if the console was not open then you would get an error. So frustrating to have the problem "go away" when you tried to dig into the issue more. At my last company we had some logic that ran first that would proxy all the console.log calls through some code that would check if IE and if the console was open before trying to call the native console.log and friends.