Simon Willison’s Weblog

Saying Goodbye to Firebug. Firebug has reached end-of-life as a separate extension, replaced by the built-in Firefox Developer Tools. It’s hard to overstate how influential Firebug has been in helping to turn front-end web development into a respected and productive engineering discipline. # 24th October 2017, 10:38 pm

Introducing Closure Tools. Google have released the pure-JavaScript library, apparently used for Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. It comes with a powerful JavaScript optimiser tool with linting built in and an accompanying Firebug extension to ensure the obfuscated code it produces can still be debugged. There’s also a template system which precompiles down to JavaScript and can also be called from Java. # 6th November 2009, 7:33 am

FireScope. Neat little Firefox / Firebug extension which adds a “Reference” tab showing documentation for the selected element from the comprehensive SitePoint Reference site. # 5th February 2009, 10:51 pm

ReferenceError: console is not defined. Since Firebug 1.2 you need to call window.loadFirebugConsole() in order for console.log and friends to work. # 23rd December 2008, 10:22 pm

Firebug Lite 1.2 (via) Huge upgrade to the IE/Opera/Safari bookmarklet version of Firebug—it now has DOM element inspection, XHR tracking and an interactive console, among other features. # 27th July 2008, 9:30 am

Google Earth in a browser (sort of), Scriptable, a quick peek and poke. Dan Catt on Google’s new browser plugin version of Google Earth... which conveniently exposes a JavaScript API to the browser in the form of the “ge” object, which can then be poked at interactively using Firebug. # 28th May 2008, 11:13 pm

Firebug Command Line API. Another thing I didn’t know about Firebug: you can set a breakpoint at the start of a function with “debug(fn)” and log all calls to it with “monitor(fn)”. # 16th May 2008, 12:14 pm

Opera Dragonfly. Opera’s new Firebug-style developer console. Out in alpha and it shows (slow to load and the interactive console leaves a lot to be desired) but still looks incredibly promising, especially the remote debugging tools for working with Opera on phones and games consoles. # 6th May 2008, 7:04 pm

Advanced JavaScript Debugging Techniques. There’s more to JavaScript debugging than just Firebug. # 4th April 2008, 7:51 am

Simple Exception Response for AJAX debugging. Neat solution to the problem of Django error pages showing up as raw HTML in the Firebug Ajax log. # 19th March 2008, 4:44 pm

Firebug + Dijit tips. News to me: Firebug has a magic $1 variable which corresponds to the currently selected node. Very handy. # 17th March 2008, 2:08 am

jQuery Logging (via) Brilliant four line jQuery plugin that lets you insert Firebug console.log() calls directly in to chains. # 19th October 2007, 12:52 pm

YSlow: Bug (fix) in Firebug’s Net Panel. The latest release of the YSlow page analysis plugin (announced at FOWA) also fixes a misleading bug in Firebug’s Net panel. # 5th October 2007, 10:26 pm

jQuery in 15 minutes. A quick introduction I put together. Much more interesting in conjunction with Firebug powered demos. # 7th August 2007, 2:57 pm

YSlow. New extension for Firebug (yes, an extension on top of another extension) from the Yahoo! performance team which provides improved performance measurement tools and optimisation advice. # 25th July 2007, 4:48 am

The YUI Team Is Hiring an Engineer To Work on Firebug. “... we’re opening a search for a full-time developer to work with Joe on advancing the Firebug roadmap.” # 7th May 2007, 10:40 pm

Dashcode review. “Dashcode is quite possibly the best non-Firebug Javascript environment I’ve ever used.” High praise indeed. # 5th March 2007, 9:06 pm

AJAX Debugging with Firebug. Great Firebug tutorial from creator Joe Hewitt himself. I didn’t know you could trigger profiling from your own code using console.profile() / console.profileEnd(). # 12th January 2007, 11:21 am

Firebug Lite. Add Firebug to your site for non-Firefox browsers. # 4th December 2006, 2:31 pm

Firebug 1.0 Beta. Unbelievably brilliant software. I use this every day. # 4th December 2006, 1:28 pm

Video: Joe Hewitt Talks About FireBug. Demo / tutorial. # 31st May 2006, 8:17 am