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Comment by jarofgreen | Hacker News Reader

Interesting/worrying comment at the end about the future of Firebug alleging there is only one developer working on it and Mozilla have all but abandoned it. Anyone able to confirm/deny/comment on the matter?

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Not sure about currently, but the (old) lead developer of FireBug left to join the Chrome team earlier this year[1]

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20080338-264/firefox-world...

Was it a Mozilla project in the first place? I thought it was just a very popular third-party addon?

> Was it a Mozilla project in the first place?

Nope.

> I thought it was just a very popular third-party addon?

Yep.

Firebug isn't 'owned' by Mozilla, and hasn't ever been, however Mozilla has contributed financially to it's development for some years, and still is.

In addition to supporting Firebug, we're also experimenting with alternative developer tools.

It's my belief that most developer tools just present the user with the information that was given to the browser in the first place, and that we can do a lot to explain how the browser actually understands all that stuff. The native developer tools are a step in that direction.

I work on Mozilla developer tools.

> Firebug isn't 'owned' by Mozilla, and hasn't ever been, however Mozilla has contributed financially to it's development for some years, and still is.

Sure, Mozilla supports the development of Firebug, but as far as I know it does not make Firebug classified as "a Mozilla project", it's a (very popular) third-party project with support from the Mozilla foundation is it not?

Right. Mozilla supports quite a variety of things that make the web a better place. Firebug is one of them.

Thanks for all your answers here, Joe. Just as a note, you may want to update your profile to reflect that you work on the dev tools.

Though it wasn't a Mozilla project, it was written by Joe Hewitt, one of the original Firefox creators.

Thank you!

    13 Jan Honza Odvarko 2011-11-09 06:03:27 PST
    ...
    (given that I am the only one maintaining the entire Firebug project now).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=699528#c13

That comment taken out of context can be quite alarming, indeed. Firebug, until recently, had two developers who were paid to work full time on it (jjb from IBM and Honza from Mozilla) and a number of people who contributed in their spare time. Now it's down to one full-time developer paid to work on it (Honza) and a number of people who still contribute in their own time.

Just to clarify, while I am the only one full time developer, there is bunch of other contributors that are doing great work on Firebug!

I am also a member of the Mozilla dev-tools team and one of the Firebug's goals in the future is to reuse Firefox built-in tools and components. This way, we can reduce amount of work on Firebug side and also make sure that APIs of these built-in tools are well designed.

So, Firebug would still be a Firefox extension, but built on top of much better APIs, adding advanced features (e.g. those that are not suitable to be natively in Firefox).

It's also an advantage for other dev-tools that can appear (as Firefox extensions) - especially for those that integrate with Firebug.

Honza

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