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Thank You, Firebug (2017)

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Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#61

Post by commandlinefan »

annnoo wrote: post #11

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

I can't even comprehend how anybody was able to do Javascript development pre-Firebug. I dabbled in client-side web development a bit in the early days of IE and found that the default behavior of a Javascript-enabled page when it encountered an error was to render a blank page and not log or report an error anywhere. I immediately retreated back to server-side development and didn't go back for years.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#62

Post by ajanuary »

tim-- wrote: post #15
_ZeD_ wrote: post #14

I still miss the possibility to `console.log` functions and have a clickable log that automatically open the right source at the right line, something that it's still not available on "native" `console`s

Can't you click on the filename/number on the right hand side? That works for me in Chrome. Source maps even allow it to open to the correct file inside Chrome.

I think they mean:

  function addStuff(a, b) {
    return a + b;
  }
  function logFunction() {
    console.log(addStuff);
  }
  logFunction();
And have it log out that `addStuff` is defined on line 1.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#64

Post by mixmastamyk »

commandlinefan wrote: post #61
annnoo wrote: post #11

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

I can't even comprehend how anybody was able to do Javascript development pre-Firebug. I dabbled in client-side web development a bit in the early days of IE and found that the default behavior of a Javascript-enabled page when it encountered an error was to render a blank page and not log or report an error anywhere. I immediately retreated back to server-side development and didn't go back for years.

Lots of alerts and console prints. Which sucked, but the modern tools support the giant monstrosities of today. So not a complete win.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#65

Post by jonathanlydall »

commandlinefan wrote: post #61
annnoo wrote: post #11

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

I can't even comprehend how anybody was able to do Javascript development pre-Firebug. I dabbled in client-side web development a bit in the early days of IE and found that the default behavior of a Javascript-enabled page when it encountered an error was to render a blank page and not log or report an error anywhere. I immediately retreated back to server-side development and didn't go back for years.

alert(…);

I taught myself programming with ASP Classic (VBScript) completely unaware of debuggers and it was normal to dump variable values to the output to try understand what was happening.

I did the same with PHP and initially the same with JavaScript.

However, once I learnt how to debug in Chrome’s dev tools, the idea of working without a debugger for any programming became unthinkable.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#66

Post by joshstrange »

I still remember where I was when I first learned about Firebug and how magical it felt. I can picture the open workspace I was in and another developer mentioning it to me. It was like going from console.log/print_r/var_dump/etc-ing to using a debugger to attach and step through code, just a night and day difference.

Nowadays we take the dev tools for granted but I'll always remember Firebug as the original dev tools and it being absolutely amazing for the time.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#67

Post by bornfreddy »

unilynx wrote: post #59
hinkley wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yup. It is quite incredible how many times Mozilla shot itself.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#68

Post by paulirish »

An interesting convention that ~started with Firebug was the use of angle brackets in the DOM/Elements view. (eg a DIV element is shown as ``). HTML, as a text format, uses angle brackets to denote tags. But DOM is an in-memory object model; it doesn't have tags, but elements, and those have nothing do with angle brackets (other than getting el.innerHTML will serialize back).

From a usability POV, it's entirely defendable: make the DOM visually look like the HTML you authored. But Firebug and our current browser devtools only add them for aesthetics and familiarity.

It rarely causes problems, but it'll explain why you'll see `` in DevTools even if your HTML doesn't have it. Still, I think dropping the HTML-y representation of DOM elements could be a win — removing end tags in particular would improve the information density.

Bonus: A Firebug Cheatsheet I made in 2007, 4 years before I was working on Chrome DevTools: https://imgur.com/I2KbZWm

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#69

Post by commandlinefan »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #64
commandlinefan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even comprehend how anybody was able to do Javascript development pre-Firebug. I dabbled in client-side web development a bit in the early days of IE and found that the default behavior of a Javascript-enabled page when it encountered an error was to render a blank page and not log or report an error anywhere. I immediately retreated back to server-side development and didn't go back for years.

Lots of alerts and console prints. Which sucked, but the modern tools support the giant monstrosities of today. So not a complete win.

Actually, console.print was a later addition - when I started looking at Javascript, you could only do alerts, or you could call "status" to display something in the lower part of the frame. And if you accidentally alert()-ed inside a loop...

Still, I can't comprehend how you could develop anything in Javascript with just console.print either. You have my respect and admiration.

Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)

#70

Post by bornfreddy »

asddubs wrote: post #29
GuB-42 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

i think the greatest thing we lost with flash is even non-technical people making something in an editor, hitting export, and getting a single small file that worked similarly enough to an image that it was trivial to just upload somewhere and have it be embedded there.

This. I hated flash sites, but it gave non-technical people a chance to be creative. Designers especially loved it, though they often used it for wrong purposes (web pages) too.

But good luck teaching them how to make that tetris clone in React nowadays...

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