Firebug 1.5.0 Release Details | Hacker News Reader

Firebug 1.5.0 Release Details

blog.getfirebug.com

48 pointssant0sk120 comments

For about a year, Firebug was horribly unstable for me. It seemed that each time they introduced a bunch of new features, the crashing, hanging, and erratic behavior (e.g. breaking at a line of source code far removed from the actual breakpoint) got worse. Happily, though, the last release before this current one reversed that trend. It didn't eliminate the problems but it did make them tolerable, which was a relief. I hope this one doesn't revive the previous tradition!

I think part of the problem is that FB wasn't designed to work with large (or even medium-sized) JS programs. We bundle all our JS into one HTTP request. It's a few thousand lines, which is big enough to cause FB noticeable trouble. A lot of the fancy features they've been adding are pretty useless to me; I wish they would simply make the console and the debugger rock solid. (And fix things like the horrible way they print arrays...)

Just to follow up on my earlier comment: so the new Firebug crapped out the very first time I tried to use it. I've already reverted to 1.4.

I don't understand this project. Serious web app developers are, I guess, not their target audience.

Edit: it's not like 1.4 works either. I set breakpoints and they just get ignored. Grrrrr.

Edit 2: so I resort to putting "debugger" keywords in my JS and Firebug breaks into the debugger at an entirely different source location. Grrrrr ^ 2.

What I do is have a separate *_debug.html page, which loads the js files individually. I.e., I have a python build script that auto builds the main.html and main_debug.html from much smaller html, css and js files. This is particularly useful when debugging older versions of IE. For the live non-debug version I also YUI-compress the concatenated js file.

I've been a big fan of firebug, even though I switched to Chrome I come back to firefox just for debugging.

No, web inspector is no match for on the fly css modification to tweak a color here and there, even editing html right there if you need it.

Yes! People always point out to me that Chrome has built-in powerful Web Inspector and I don't have to go back to Firefox to keep using firebug. Web Inspector _might_ be a powerful dev tool but firebug is very intuitive to me for quick look-ups on the source. I really hope they can do a full firebug port on chrome, this is the only thing that's stopping me from using Chrome exclusively. But I doubt this will happen, because Chrome extension frame work in its current form has limited functionality, unlike Firefox.

Have you (or the OP) tried Safari's (or better yet, a WebKit nightlies) Web Inspector? Its more powerful than the one in Chrome.

FWIW, Chrome dev channel's inspector is approximately equivalent to the one in webkit nightlies.

I haven't found Chrome's debugging tools inferior to Firebug. I therefore use Chrome for increased browser startup time and reduced memory usage. What feature of Firebug do you use that Chrome doesn't have?

They left out "Segfaults Firefox 3.5.7 on x64 ubuntu 9.10"

I had the same issue on x64 fedora 11, but found a workaround (although a bit annoying one). Delete the .mozilla directory and start firefox, install firebug, then it works. I tried messing with files left behind from the previous firebug individually, but couldn't find a specific culprit...

Annoying bug, this is just a temporary workaround.

Happily, the crash is fixed in 3.5.8.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.5/+bug/4...

To be fair, 64-bit Linux builds of Firefox are currently an unsupported configuration.

I just upgraded to this (Leopard 10.5, FF 3.5.7), and the feature I used the most is now borked. Right-clicking an element and selecting "inspect element", or expanding Firebug and expanding the nested child elements (clicking the arrow to expand the contents of the div > the form > the fieldset > the input) is now completely broken. Has anybody else had this happen? Any fixes you can recommend?

In case anyone hits the same problems I did, upgrading Firefox to 3.6 seems to have fixed it.

I've been 1.5a since 1.4 was released (or since I knew about it). 1.5 is mostly bugfixes. For my purposes 1.4 was completely unusable.

I've been using this since early beta. It's performance is worse than 1.3.x. The new features are miniscule at best. I happened to open an older VM the other day that was running FF3.0 and Firebug 1.2. I was shocked at how fast it was compared to the newer versions. I had forgotten. They need to stop worrying about new features and focus on speed.

why would they allow it it to become slower than it already is? It seems like they want more people to move away from firefox.

New features that I like:

- Computed styles and DOM are now tabs when working in HTML

- "Persist" buttons for both the Console and Net. I haven't tested it yet, but there have been many times where it would have been very useful.

the html inspection (outlining) works a lot better than in 1.4. several of my sites had outlining way off in 1.4, very frustrating.

Is this release is better for debugging than using chrome? What do you recommend?

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