Firebug website just got a super gorgeous facelift | Hacker News Reader

Firebug website just got a super gorgeous facelift

getfirebug.com

28 pointsaudionerd22 comments

>The most popular web development tool for Firefox

They could probably call it "The most popular web development tool period." and it wouldn't be a lie.

There are plenty of designers\developers who keep firefox around only for firebug.

Yes, thats the only reason Firefox is installed on my machine.

Started a new contract the other day, and one of the folks I'm working with asked me what the deal is with my browser (I use Chrome to hold documentation / collab tools) - everybody else simply uses Firefox for everything. I can't stand how slow FF is for general browsing, but I cannot give up Firebug for the work I do.

Best part? Not the CSS editing, and not the JavaScript debugger (although that's really handy too) - truly the most useful features are the DOM inspector (easier to do that than look up some rarely-used property in the ref specs) combined with the console (test out a one-off bit of idea before fleshing it out and integrating it into the actual codebase).

I have recently been using the latest webkit nightly for all of my debugging. It's developer inspector is getting fairly close to firebug in terms of useful-ness. There are a few instances where it can't quite jump into the code as well as firebug but its getting there.

I have to disagree about it being 'gorgeous'. I think it could use more layers. It feels very flat to me, and it doesn't direct my eye to any one thing in particular

Plus they just sourced their icons from somewhere, hit CTRL+SHIFT+U (Desaturate) and left them as is. I either expected them to change colour when I moused over them, or if they are meant to remain static they should have been contrasted or leveled properly. They look blurry and amateur.

I knew as soon as I saw the post title, that every comment in this thread would be ripping how it looked. If you're ever thinking of commenting on the attractive appearance of a site, just don't bother. There's nothing hypercritical people hate worse than that.

perhaps that's because saying "yep, looks great" doesn't contribute anything and would get downvoted.

if you agree that it looks great, you'll upvote the article, which more people have done than upvoting hate comments. (although obviously there are other reasons people might upvote the article.)

The culprit is found easily: The headline of the submission. It is just not good to post something like that. Reverse flamebait or however you might call it.

Re: the top bar. People shouldn't feel like they need to have an explanatory note on each menu item or option. Which is easier to grok?

* What is Firebug? / Introduction and Features

* Resources / Documentation wiki, FAQ, and other Firebug lore

* Community / Discussion forums and lists

* Get Involved / Hack the code, create plugins

* About

* Documentation

* Community

* Get Involved

(And maybe "Get Involved" should be "Contribute")

I like those listings tbh. They save me some thinking - "Community" and "Get involved" ideas have some overlap and many projects divide the contents differently (for example, where does the source control go? - developer oriented projects often put it in community). While "About" and "Documentation" don't overlap that much, there should be some links from the first to the second for detailed information - which makes you wonder where is the "Getting started" section - it could be in either of them. I think describing sections like that serves a purpose.

I dunno. It's pretty busy and confusing. I like the bug, but not the design.

I don't even like the bug. I feel like the bug should be a stinging bug.

My bugs aren't friendly lady bugs with fire shells. They are savage robotic hornets sent from the past to destroy my future.

I like this: <div id="boasting">

They're using some neat HTML5 tech on the page. Ogg video, embedded fonts. The header background image, though, seems to be a ".pmg", which I'm not familiar with, and doesn't show up for me on chrome. Maybe a typo for png, but that image gives a 404 page.

nope, the .png doesn't exist either, but the 404 page it hits is kind of fun: http://getfirebug.com/img/bg-header.pmg

Far from gorgeous in FF 3.6 Win. A few quick ones:

1. Use (or make better use of) a grid layout.

2. Vary the type less. I count 3 fonts (excluding Firebug logo type) in too many sizes.

3. The 6 feature/functions (inspect, log, etc.) aren't doing much for me, and the bullets could be condensed. Firebug is awesome -- no need for fluff like Get the information you need to get it done with Firebug.

Ugh, the lines are off between the "Recent News" and "Links and Elsewhere" columns. web typography: care about it!

It's pretty, and it gets you to the content fast. I have no complaints. And the bugs are rad.

The best website is no website. "apt-get install xul-ext-firebug"++.

A thousand times no! I barely trust the distro people to not screw up the browser itself. The only reason to use a distro-packaged extension would be that it's more likely to be fucked in lockstep with the browser.

I'm sure you use CPAN, gems, hackage, etc. instead of the broken crap in nearly every distro's repositories -- why not use http://addons.mozilla.org while you're at it?

I use OS packages for everything. Fixing the occasional breakage there is much easier than the constant manual updating and tweaking required to maintain your own installation of everything.

I have a few local Emacs Lisp extensions, and I maintain my own ~/perl5 and ~/.cabal... but I bootstrap them with the OS packages; various emacs extensions, the OS perl and liblocal-lib-perl, and haskell-platform. Modules my own software needs goes into ~; modules that OS-managed software needs I leave untouched.

Basically, if your distribution breaks your packages regularly, you should get a new distribution.

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