Firebug extension has been discontinued | Hacker News Reader

Firebug extension has been discontinued

getfirebug.com

74 pointsthejosh26 comments

In my opinion Firebug started a revolution in web development, making JS webapps feasible for regular devs for the first time.

Thank you for giving us a lot of the interfaces and tools that live on as "developer tools" in today's browsers.

Precisely. The web-developer world we take for granted was singlehandedly brought to life by Firebug. What used to be alert("foo") was replaced with console.logs, and there was no going back. Its probably a good thing that Firebug is discontinued. It has fared well, and made the world a better place.

It certainly made it easier for me to copy code and dissect it :)

I remember using Firebug years ago and it was absolutely awesome. It made developing on Firefox about 100 times easier than on any other browser.

Then, of course Chrome came out and Firefox added built-in dev tools, so it makes sense to stop development.

Still, such a good product.

Nooooo.

I use both and Firebug is so much better :( :( :(

For example Firebug outputs the entire nested array, while the dev tools just say "Array[len]" for nested arrays (or objects).

The problem with that is if you are debugging and something changes the values inside that array (after you output it) you have no record of the old values, since clicking on the Array[len] shows you the new values, not the old ones.

In general that's my biggest problem with the Dev Tools - it likes to reuse windows, and make you click on things for more info. So if you click on Network and want to see the response from two requests at once you can't - both show their info in the same window, and overwrite each other.

In firebug in contrast you click + and it simply expands, inline, and you can see both at once.

I don't suppose anyone knows a setting I can change to fix that and make Dev Tools more usable?

Use console.dir(var) for a moment-in-time snapshot. The side panel you get when you click on a var is a debug view, which is a lot more useful as a "live" value watcher.

it's a bit hacky but you can solve that with:

console.log(JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(myArrToDebug)));

It fully clones the array (impossible to have odd refs hang around).

Firebug is the reason IE lost it's dominance. Once it was easier to test on firefox rather than IE (which was ~99% of browsers at the time) the compatibility problem solved itself.

Ballmer was onto something.

The end of an era. LLAP.

"Live Long and Prosper" according to Google... I misread your comment as LDAP and spent a couple of seconds trying to work out what LDAP had to do with Firebug (and having flashbacks to trying to debug a call to LDAP with firebug many years ago).

"May the force be with you" for the comment below.

Came here to say the same thing except MTFBWY

Been a while since I've done web development; are the Firefox Dev Tools as good as Firebug?

I think the Dev Tools are better at some things (browsing the elements on the page) but not as good at others (seeing the contents of the POST/GET and contents of cookies).

No, they lack a few features, and what's even worse, they are buggy sometimes. For example, the styles panel disappears for me completely sometimes. I'm really sad to see Firebug go.

debug.html is coming : )

If you don't mind Chrome, it has the best debugging tools I know. I love Firebug, but I can understand why they are discontinuing it.

Nope.

Maybe a little melodramatic, but WTF 2016!?!

It's not gone; it's built-in to Firefox.

The best tool ever. I'd still be using it if Chrome didn't copy it and make it better. It's probably why Chrome took off so well. I even used Firebug lite in IE at some stage in mid 2000's to troubleshoot stuff in it.

Firebug changed JavaScript debugging forever. Gone but not forgotten as they say

Thanks to all who worked, supported and helped with Firebug. It was the first really great tool to help make the web and web development better for us all.

An unceremonious end to a go-to tool for me.

Farewell, my dear friend.

First TamperData now FireBug. Seems like Mozilla is not interested in having professionals on their platform anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com