Firebug 1.2 Excitement
Posted 2 months ago by jacques | 19 comments
It goes without saying that every web developer uses and loves Firebug. For me, it’s pretty much single handedly made web development tolerable again.
I found out a few days ago that Firefox 3 beta 5 broke Firebug 1.1. I wasn’t going to be able to live with this, and didn’t want to downgrade back to Beta4 just yet, so I went searching for a fix. This eventually led me to the Firebug 1.2 alpha. And it just so happens that it’s awesome. 1.2 seems to fix nearly every one of my complaints with Firebug.
Here are the significant improvements I’ve seen so far:
Open in External Editor
For me, this one is huge. Previously if you were copy/pasting code and css from Firebug you ended up with a mess of line numbers. p.
This way you can set your external editor to textmate to pop open the javascript or css from any page in no time.
JQuery Selector Display
JQuery selector output now displays correctly again, and you can hover directly over the elements to see it outlined in the browser. It used to work in Prototype but not JQuery. Now it works in both.
Function Display in Logger
Previously in Firebug, if you outputted a function, it would just display as “function()”. Now firebug will actually show the function source code.
Additional Thoughts
If there other killer features I missed please let me know in the comments.
Also keep in mind Firebug isn’t just a debugging tool. It’s also the most effective learning tool out there for front-end web development. When doing normal site browsing, you should keep firebug enabled and on hand. When you see a design or script you really like, open up the code in firebug and hack on it a bit. In 1 or 2 months, this will likely give you more knowledge of real world web development skills than reading any number of books on the subject.
So bring on the beta already! Help the project by reporting any bugs you find to the Firebug Google Code project.
Wow. Thanks for the tip!
you could do like i do. use firefox portable from portableapps.com and have firebug on a separate firefox so its never broken and always available and continue to use the latest firefox on the machine. although i now have both firefox portable 2.0 with firebug and firefox portable 3beta5 without firebug. works great.
Quick question, what is that firefox these you are using?
And where would we find the 1.2 alpha? A lot of clicking all over the Firebug site revealed nothing for me.
See releases page:
http://www.getfirebug.com/releases/index.html
David, check the Firebug Google Code project (link in the last line of this blog post).
Firefox can use multiple profiles very easily.. there's no need for PortableXXX.
The extensions installed in one profile are not present in the other.
Also, Firefox by itself is easy to install in two versions.. I have both 2.0 and 3.0
Whoops, forgot to put the link to download Firebug 1.2. Post has been updated
Ian, that firefox is the new FF3 beta for the Mac. The Mozilla team overhauled the UI for the Mac version giving a more native look and allowing it to use the MacOS controls and what not.
Thanks, guys - obviously I didn't click around enough. :)
1.2 is looking sweet....
I agree Firebug is an amazing extension and Joe does a great job with it, but like anyone or any code bugs can creep in so it's probably not a good idea to keep Firebug running all the time.
For example: http://larholm.com/2007/04/06/more-0day-in-firebug/
I know this particular exploit has been fixed, and very quickly :)
But there is always a chance others might creep in.
What I normally do is keep it disabled, and then only enable it for trusted sites.
1.2 Alpha is NOT working with YSlow!
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