The sixth Web
Exponents tech talk features Rob Campbell's presentation on
Firebug. Rob works at Mozilla. He's one of the developers that Mozilla dedicated to the
Firebug effort last July. Rob is one of the main drivers of the Firebug project,
starting and heading up the weekly concalls, and closely tracking bugs and releases. As one of
the founders of the Firebug Working Group, I'm
excited to see Mozilla taking a more active role in Firebug. The benefits are clear as we see
more features and greater stability with each Firebug release. Here's the video of Rob's
presentation as well as a link to his slides.
Rob starts by
highlighting what's new in Firebug 1.4 alpha.
It's a joy for me to see that activation (enabling and disabling) has been simplified. Rob
points out that the firebug icon serves also as a menu. One of the menu items is "Open With
Editor", which developers will find useful for saving changes to their pages. A much needed UI
change is flipping the tabs and buttons. The tabs used to be below the buttons. Putting them
at the top is closer to what users expect from working with other tabbed UIs.
The new "pause" button will be useful for anyone debugging JavaScript. This implements
"break on next" functionality, making it easier to stop when event handlers are called.
Firebug's Net Panel has had significant improvements. The UI is better (colors!), but there's
even more. The underlying timing information has been improved to give more accurate results.
There are also markers for DOMContentLoaded and OnLoad, to show where those fire in relation
to network requests.
Firebug Extensions
provide a way for developers to add functionality that can be shared with others. Rob mentions
several extensions including:
Firediff - tracker for
changes made to DOM and CSS
Writing an extension is a great way to explore future
directions for Firebug.
Rob talks about future roadmap. Firebug 1.5 will
focus on extensions - making them easier to build and use. Firebug 1.6 will change the
underlying JavaScript debugging mechanism in Firefox to support new features. Add Rob's blog to
your RSS reader to find out about these future releases and other improvements to Firebug.
