Bring back 3D View!
Thank You, Firebug (2017)
81–89 of 89 posts
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#82My former employer is still using HTA (HTml Application) to dynamically render a lot of tool windows in their massive legacy COM application on Windows. HTAs render using an IE6-era renderer that is still present in Windows. (I wasn't in the group that built these tool windows, but I did build a lot of in-house web apps to help with various workflows.) A few years ago, I had a colleague come by with bug he couldn't s…
Microsoft themselves ended up doing something like this—VorlonJS. https://github.com/MicrosoftDX/Vorlonjs > There's also weinre https://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/ >, which is the same with the (old) WebKit Inspector code, rather than Firebug.
Firebug Lite enabled debugging directly within the tool window -- i.e. the Firebug UI appeared on the bottom edge of the HTA UI area (not a remote debugging scenario).
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#83Firebug was some truly excellent work - but I think it's worth also mentionining its precursor Venkman - which in turn built upon the js/jsd low-level debugging APIs inside the mozilla suite. https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/ edit: there's a nice write-up of how firebug got started here https://flailingmonkey.com/the-history-of-firebug
> I think it's worth also mentionining its precursor Venkman Is it, really? The experience of Venkman was horrendous. Not quite as bad as MS’s Script Debugger (I don’t remember venkman crashing multiple times per session, and it was able to debug the toplevel frame), but still just awful all around. And more relevant, it was nothing special, at least that I remember. It was notable in being a “normal” extension, but…
Venkman was horrendous. But it was still better than not having a script debugger at all, which was the status quo.
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#84Firebug was great and I am grateful that it existed!
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#85On 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…
It's a known problem, especially with the move away from self-styled OOP paradigms and the rise of closure-infested programming. (I.e., "OOP, but with closures—and which (for overall very bad reasons) we're going to insist on describing as FP".) Recent thoughts by one of the Eve/Light Table developers: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/coding/ > (Ctrl+F on "hard-to-query state" and "reachable".)
Thank you for the link!
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#86I genuinely wonder if Flash/Silverlight would have won without this single tool.
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…
Remember that some mobile devices had Flash and that Mac OS X 10.0 had a large emphasis on Java since it was big at the time.
If Flash would not be the lame duck it was at the time, and Adobe not as defunct, iPhone would simply include it.
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#87Wow, 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…
Firefox 1(?) already had the error console, which told the _correct line_ where the error happened with more meaningful messages. Unlike IE where the message was something like `Unknown error at line 10203` when you had only a big HTML table and some inline JS.
That was already a big improvement, but then Firebug was another dimension.
Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#88Wow, 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.
document.getElementById('debug').innerHTML += log + '
'
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Re: Thank You, Firebug (2017)
#89It was ABSOLUTELY wonderful to have Firebug back in 2006/7 timeframe. I really enjoyed using it and looking at the DOM and whatnot!