Firebug 1.4 Alpha – Worth It
I had a nice email exchange with one of the guys on the Firebug team recently. Basically, I miss Firebug 1.2 w/ Firefox 2.0, but Firefox 3 has some features I really don’t want to live without. In our email conversation, I shared a laundry list of issues that I’ve observed Firebug 1.3 doing that make my life less awesome.
Anyway, one of the suggestions I got was to upgrade to the alpha version of Firebug 1.4 and, I gotta say, it’s worth it. It’s not quite as solid as things were back on Firefox 2, but it’s way better than Firebug 1.3.
You can grab the latest builds here: http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.4/?C=M;O=A (My Firebug friend recommends the most-recent, currently 1.4a22).
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May 4th, 2009 at 11:45 am
The absolute killer feature of Firebug is CSS line-numbers. Add that to WebKit’s Inspector and Firebug is dead to me.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
You can never make me stop using Firefox2 + Firebug1 for my daily debugging!
The evolution of Firebug is a great example of how not to screw up your application. Old versions FTW.
Webkit’s inspector is the worse of them all, even worse than the latest firebugs (which are pretty insanely bad).
May 4th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Yeah, Firebug 1.4 is better than 1.3 and it is pretty stable with Firefox 3.5 although lots of stuff is really really broken badly..
May 5th, 2009 at 6:11 am
Hi,
can you develop about the features you find better in Firebug 1.2 (or 1.4 now) than in the 1.3 ? I don’t remember Firebug 1.2 was better.
May 5th, 2009 at 7:22 am
@Spi, it’s not about features really so much as stability and reliability. FB1.3 just isn’t as useful, provides poorer error reporting, reports errors from other tabs, throws its own errors… FB1.2 was rock solid and made my job easier. FB1.3 often has me going to other browsers to see if it’s lying to me or not.
May 5th, 2009 at 8:04 am
I’m totally with Valerio on this on. As long as FF2 is on the list of browsers I have to support it will be my default development/debugging browser. Firebug 1.2 was too stable to give up while Firebug 1.3 just makes me furious. When 1.4 is released I’ll check out the stability of it, but for now I need a debugging tool I can trust more than I need the bleeding edge version.
May 6th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Ok. It’s right that with the 1.3 version, I have some strange errors in the console and that I have sometimes to clean it and restart my tests. And I remember one other thing, in script mode, sometimes you only have some few lines that are shown and you have to scroll for a global refresh … when you can scroll (even for big files, the scrollbar is not always show).
I’ve never made the relation between the migration and the apparition of these problems.
You’ve opened my eyes ;)
Thanks
May 7th, 2009 at 8:02 am
The title of the post is misleading, as someone might think that the 1.4alpha is good, but the reality as explained in the rest of the post and the comments is that Firebug has been going down, they try to appeal more regular users, but if we could use previous versions with the current Firefox then I guess that nobody would be using 1.3 and even 1.4 acts too weirdly.
This might sound heretic, but sometimes I find the IE Developer tools more useful that the current state of Firebug.