Something's pretty broken with Firebug...
addons.mozilla.org
addons.mozilla.org
I suspect the root of the problem is that Firebug started as a nice little ad hoc add-in, attempted to evolve into a production development tool, and is breaking down under the strain. That plus the personnel changes on the project would explain what we're seeing.
It's bad because none of the alternatives I've tried are an adequate replacement yet.
What are you talking about?
it works just fine
Have you tested it on my code?
I couldn't care less about the whitelist bug and don't even know what it is. All I want is a reliable console and debugger.
Edit: oh, I just remembered another problem (because it just happened): breakpoints or debugger statements that cause the debugger to break, but jump to the completely wrong source location. This happens all the time and nothing seems to help. (The recommendation to create a new FF profile, which appears to be 80% of the advice given on the Firebug discussion group, doesn't fix this.)
The icon was changed to the flat "box" design at the last minute as part of a larger icon re-design effort, and that happened when it did just because a volunteer showed up at that time to do it.
I overheard a developer looking for 15 minutes to find the "inspect" option when it became a flashlight. Now it's some square with a cursor pointed at it (which isn't so bad), but now there's a little "Off" button over on the right side instead of the way I typically closed the window. So now I double-take whenever I'm trying to hide Firebug-- I keep wondering for a split second if I'm clicking the right button.
I love Firebug more than any other extension ever (besides the Tree-style tabs), but the UI refactoring keeps messing me up.
1) Uninstall Firebug 1.4.0.
2) Go to the URL "about:config".
3) Right-click on the list of preferences and select New -> Boolean.
4) Enter the name "extensions.checkCompatibility".
5) Set its value to false.
I downgraded more or less immediately after 1.4.0 came out. 1.3.3 seems to work just fine with Firefox 3.5.
By far the most frustrating change for me is that Firebug (and the console) turns off when minimized. I often work on my laptop where screen real estate is at a premium, and having firebug ignore errors when its minimized is maddening.
Unfortunately I've come to enjoy FireQuery, which only works with the 1.4 beta or higher, so I've got to choose between them. Argh!
I maintain four addons built on top of Firebug (www.binaryage.com). It is very difficult for me to keep things working for different Firefox and Firebug versions. Especially when firebug authors are changing internals and extension points with almost every new version. And then come some people on mozilla addons and downvote my addons because they are not working for them when they first try. They even don't try to test different Firebug/Firefox versions, they just complain.
Maybe Firebug authors have same feelings about us Firebug users, or on the other hand about Firefox developers who are probably making their lives harder. I don't know. The true is that I've seen lot of criticism about broken Firebug since version 1.2
I'd imagine its tedious to maintain compatibility with each successive version, much less several at once. From an end user, please know that your hard work is appreciated.
Unfortunately there is no good alternative to Firebug, since it's been so great for so long no one has felt the need to make a compelling rival.
For the current project I'm working on, which is heavily JS based: console rarely works (evaling code snippets, console.log, etc).
It also always shows the message: 'reload to enable console', which never works. On my previous project it throws random buggy errors on every XMLHttpRequest.
The final thing which appears to be by design, is that you cannot see Net requests while its minimized, which is frustrating but I'd live with that if the other bugs were fixed.
What about Safari's Web Inspector?
(If these things have changed since I last tried it, I'd like to know.)
The rest of the UI suffers from similar problems. Everything is there, it's just buried, set to a bad default, etc.
They really ought to steal from firebug more wholeheartedly.
The Web Inspector's major shortcoming is the lack of a UI to edit the some aspects of the DOM directly (you can do it in the JS console by running DOM queries). One can't remove existing nodes or add new ones via the Web Inspector UI; nor can one add new CSS styles (although one can edit node attributes and the values of existing CSS declarations).
All of this means that even for those of us with access to Safari (i.e. not developers working on Linux) there's still a pressing need for Firebug, so if they keep breaking it with updates pretty soon everyone will be reverting to 3.0.x and the older versions which, while they had a few niggles, essentially worked.
When editing an existing rule you can add a new rule on the same line.Once you hit enter Web Inspector will put the new rule on a new line.
If there is no existing rule for an element you can cheat one in by adding 1 pixel padding via the metrics panel, which creates in inline padding style. The edit that rules or and add new rules as above.
Again, not as good as Firebug, but might be useful for some.
It looks like this is being actively worked on: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18224
I agree the lack of DOM editing UI is a problem.
http://groups.google.com/group/firebug/browse_thread/thread/...
IE's script error handling has been so useless for so long that it took a while to sink in that it's so much better now. As in, it's miles ahead of Firebug. Proper call stack navigation, break-on-error that drops you into the debugger. It just plain works.
For CSS debugging and network traffic inspection, Firebug is still the defacto standard. I don't think it's going anywhere, but it's certainly in second place now when it comes to JS debugging.
Even with the new debugger, it still tool me nearly 10 hours to figure out that IE was occasionally moving a text range from an iFrame to the parent document when I tried to use the selection.pasteHTML method. I thought it was a bug in my code...
But it sure speaks well of FF that they have the issues boldly presented on their site.
Its pretty handy for disabling javascript, changing forms from POST to GET, viewing form fields and trying different browser window sizes.
Otherwise though it does have a lot of pointless options.
To me they complement each other quite well.
Also, FF 3.5 does not automatically zoom the text as 3.0 did. I'm probably gonna revert to 3.0.
3.5 remembers your zoom settings (set with ctrl + / ctrl -) for each domain.
This article moved me to downgrade back to 1.3: http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.3X/firebug-1.3X.4b2...
every single release of firefox and firebug have seemed to have this period of breaking everything, usually by the next release its sorted, but its still an inconvenience