Firebug… What’s the deal?

Published
by
Zahnster
on July 21, 2008
in Browsers
.

Just posting quick to publicly announce my intense disappointment in how Firebug has been maintained recently. Firebug 1.2.0 (beta 6) is so awful and buggy that today I’ve given up on it completely. Which is sad, really, because it means that my use of Firefox 3 is limited to browsing the web… as if I were some ‘normal’ web user and not a developer who constantly has her browser open for the purpose of developing websites.

So, for now, I have to go back to using FF2…. which is a bigger letdown than one would think.

The only light we have at the end of the tunnel was the recent announcement by John Resig that he would be devoting half his time to get Firebug back to where it needs to be.

This can’t happen soon enough.

3 Responses to “Firebug… What’s the deal?”

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  1. 1 Zach
    July 21, 2008 at 5:32 pm

    Really? I’ve had a lot of trouble with firebug and firefox 3, I’m currently using 1.2.0 b6 and everything finally seems stable. Maybe some other extensions are goofing it up?

  2. 2 Zahnster
    July 21, 2008 at 6:30 pm

    At Zenbe we make heavy use of the debug console (b/c our javascript is responsible for most of the site, it’s seriously heavy), and I think the various problems I’ve been seeing are partially related to that.

    One error which happens every time is this ‘net.js’ file consistently errors out and freezes up the browser. Searching on Google hints that it’s a problem caused by framesets (Zenbe uses frames), however, there’s no fix in yet and who knows when that’ll happen.

    There was also an odd problem today with our file uploader throwing an error if Firebug was enabled - I’m not even going to begin to try to figure that out.

    So Firebug 2 seems to work alright for simple sites, but for the complex web application which is Zenbe - no dice. Which burns, because Firebug 1 has been the ultimate lifesaver.

  3. 3 Wolf
    August 18, 2008 at 12:56 pm

    I’ve been noticing that the Firefox’s CSS defaults (there’s a few files like html.css and forms.css) sometimes pop up in your style view, which can be annoying. The performance is sometimes a bit of a letdown too.

    However I’m using the beta’s and they seem to improve a little bit each version. I can only hope, like you, that things will get better when John Resig gets involved.

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