Problems with Firebug
remysharp.com
remysharp.com
Firebug bugs are easier to deal with because there is more information and controls with which to isolate bugs. I admit they can catch you off guard from time to time, but as someone who cut his teeth on javascript in 1995, CSS in the IE4/NS4 era, I can tell you that IE6 is the bigger albatross around your neck. It's disingenuous to claim otherwise.
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E59...
Microsoft: screwing you with network effects since before the WWW
The Firebug team created a product that moves web development a generation a head in terms of tool sets, then released that tool for free when most people would have gladly paid for it.
It's free, and open source. If there are bugs, stop bitching, roll up your sleeves, and submit a patch.
Firebug may suck compared to an ideal Firebug, but IE6 sucks compared to the standards-compliant browsers that everyone else has moved on to.
I have heard that IE8s developer tools are also very good compared with Firebug.
It will also be interesting to see how Chrome shapes up as far as developer tools go.
Unless you just don't want to leave Firefox, or are using a strictly linux system, you might get better results doing your development in a different browser. At least that is what has worked for me.
Linux is not Firefox only by any means - Google Chrome for Linux is very good, and the development tools are identical to the Windows and Mac versions of Chrome (which are the same Safari's tools). Opera for Linux is also top-notch.
Have you tried IE 8's dev tools? Firebug beats the pants off of IE 8's tool in usability and features, for me. Like most of IE, the dev tools are adequate, but lack a decent interface and are not updated or improved often, if ever.
I like Chrome and Safari's tools, but my personal assessment is that Firebug is more comfortable. It has all of the featured you mentioned except possibly the local database inspector.
For the site I work on the most, twice as much of our audience uses Firefox as Safari and Chrome combined, and FF even exceeds IE usage. So not only does it have my preferred dev tools, but is the most important browser for our audience.
The most common problem I've run into with Firebug is that Firefox stops loading CSS/JS files. I've never had this happen without Firebug open, but it may be a Firefox problem.
The live style tweak is by far the most used feature in Firebug for my team.
Usually when you're editing stuff in Firebug it's because you're trying, nudging a pixel here, a shade of gray there, trying to get the "right" values to yield the effect you want. Having to go back to the editor is a pain, just as it was before in-browser debuggers, when you had to go back to the editor and add alert() traces all over it.
On the fly edition of stuff is also nowhere as good as Firebug's (when it works at all).
The jQuery object is exactly that. An object. With a length. What do you want Firebug to do, build jQuery support in the extension? Yeah, right.
And as to not having random extra plugins, I see at least 3 non-native firebug tabs in the first video...
Not saying firebug is ideal or anything, but some of TFA's criticisms barely make any sense (and that comes from somebody mostly using Safari's dev tools these days)
I thought, maybe I'm crazy, so I tried replicating it, and I can't. I just opened up firebug, made a larger console, typed "test", clicked the run button, got the same error and my console is still there, still displaying "test" like it should. Hopped over to my PC (which I use for testing sites in IE6 because it is such a pile of fail) and tried the same thing in that version of firebug, also works as expected.
I'm not sure what this guy is complaining about, isolate your issue before you post link bait.
I would be awesome if someone did build the concept of profiles so that you could set firebug to do Dojo, or JQuery or YUI etc.. deep debugging in a manner that suits that toolkit.
They had a great start, and forced Microsoft to release IE7, but since then they've just sort of coasted along. MS came out with IE8, which turned out to be a pretty good browser. Then Google came out with Chrome, which redefined what a browser is supposed to be like.
So now we have FireFox still taking 30 seconds to fire up and basically functioning like a poor version of IE8 (but with plugins), while IE9 is coming out looking exactly like a Chrome clone and Chrome is sprinting off into the distance (yet still firing up in 3 seconds).
FF just seems to lose a bit more relevance every year.
But I can't really see myself moving on to other browsers...
Just because of 2 plugins:
1. Mouse gestures, OK - Chrome has them now but now the second one is a gamebreaker. 2. TreeTabs - I just cant browse without it anymore.
I'd really like to move on to Chrome, but without TreeTabs - I'll just suffer the loading times :)
I'm not interested in Firefox any more myself, but I feel you're being too harsh on its progress.
For me, Firefox takes about 1 second to open on my Mac, 2 seconds in Linux, and 3 seconds in Windows. No idea how you see it as similar to IE 8 in any way.
I agree they have a long way to go to be as slick as Chrome, but sorry, it has nothing to do with Opera - Opera never had even 1/10 of the market share that FF has now.
I'm no IE hater, but it's pretty evident for any serious programmer that IE8 is simply a patched-up IE6.