Something's pretty broken with Firebug...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/1843

by geuis • 17 years ago

52 59 17 years ago

addons.mozilla.org

ExJournalist• 17 years ago

Yes, it's a real pain to see that (for now, for a lot of uses) Firebug's broken.

But it sure speaks well of FF that they have the issues boldly presented on their site.

Elepsis• 17 years ago

Erm? Does it speak well of Amazon when it "boldly" presents negative customer reviews on its pages? I mean, yes, I think it's useful, but I don't think that presentation of user reviews reflects particularly well OR poorly on Mozilla.

boundlessdreamz• 17 years ago

Firebug is a recommended addon and mozilla folks actively work on firebug. It is almost a semi-official mozilla addon now

warfangle• 17 years ago

I had to revert back to FF 3.0 so I could use the older version of Firebug. I rely on it for work (both javascript and css), and the new version simply doesn't work. Really quite disappointing... I guess they wanted to get it 'out the door' so people could start using it with FF 3.5, but they rolled in a bunch of UI changes with it... small increments, people! :)

zacharydanger• 17 years ago

Yeah it was really annoying to have the old "inspect" link replaced by a flashlight icon and the next day replaced with a "mouse cursor over a box" icon. o_0

curtis• 17 years ago

The much maligned flashlight icon was totally my fault. I changed the old button with a label to a straight icon when I moved the tabs from the lower toolbar to the top toolbar. As far as I can tell, nobody has complained about the tab location being moved. But it's pretty clear that nobody loved the flashlight!

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.

thorax• 17 years ago

It all changes again in 1.5. (sigh) It's like a game where every time I upgrade Firebug on a machine I have to relearn the entire UI. I have no idea why they do it pretty much every single time. (FYI-- http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.5X/ )

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.

fendale2• 17 years ago

That could easily have been me yelling at it last week. Took me ages to find the Ajax post requests were now in the 'net' section instead of console!

hellweaver666• 17 years ago

The change of UI is really hacking me off as well. It was all nice and easy to use for ages, then suddenly the UI seemed to change a number of times over a couple of weeks since the release of FF 3.5. grrrr.

qeorge4• 17 years ago

This is actually the first I'd heard about FB 1.3 not working with FF 3.5. I've been using 1.3 with the 3.5 beta for months (now normal 3.5), overriding the compatibility setting with Nightly Tester Tools. I recommend giving it a shot:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6543

unfletch• 17 years ago

You don't have to downgrade Firefox to use an old version of Firebug:

  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.

At that point you can install the old version of your choice from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/184....

I downgraded more or less immediately after 1.4.0 came out. 1.3.3 seems to work just fine with Firefox 3.5.

geuis• 17 years ago

I (personally) like the UI changes. I was using the 1.5 alpha versions in combination with the 3.5 beta since June and was quite happy with the combo. However, in the last 5-10 releases of the 1.5 alpha, the performance has severely regressed. Often the inspector doesn't update the console with html selections and the console becomes unresponsive overall. I was having to close and reopen the tab of the site I was working on to get the inspector working again. I just switched back to the latest version of 1.4 with 3.5.1 and it seems to be working quite well.

eli• 17 years ago

Incidentally, Safari (for mac or windows) comes with decent Firebug-like debugging functionality built-in

halo• 17 years ago

As does IE8 and Chrome. You can also download Opera Dragonfly.

krakensden• 17 years ago

Dragonfly makes you select the tab you want to work on before you can work on it- instead of defaulting to the open tab.

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.

ionfish• 17 years ago

Safari's Web Inspector is far, far better than it used to be, and has indeed gone a long way towards catching Firebug. The problem is that it isn't there yet; otherwise, I'd only be dipping into Firefox to test things.

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.

dflock• 17 years ago

I'm a web developer running Linux exclusively and I've recently started using Chromium, which works great and provides the webkit Web Inspector (right click, Inspect Element). Inspector isn't quite as good as Firebug, but Chromium is quite a bit better than Firefox, so it's not a bad trade.

msmithstubbs• 17 years ago

Web Inspector does allow you to create new CSS rules, though it's not intuitive at all.

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.

indiejade• 17 years ago

Works fine for me; I just installed Fx 3.5.1 this morning and am running version 1.4.0 of firebug. . . on Linux.

daleharvey• 17 years ago

I like a few of the changes, but they seemed to disable the functionality to disable firebug on a per domain basis, which kinda screws me with gmail.

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

lzell• 17 years ago

Regarding the "Reload the window to activate..." comments. I was running into this too. It is fixed in the 1.5 alpha version. You can go here: http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.5X and install firebug-1.5X.0a18.xpi.

quellhorst• 17 years ago

I can't get selenium tests to work in firefox 3.5 either.

alexbosworth• 17 years ago

I've heard that Firebug has a new maintainer, and has a very large and complicated code base - which has led to many bugs in the new release.

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.

Zev• 17 years ago

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

What about Safari's Web Inspector?

gruseom4• 17 years ago

It's significantly less usable for me. For example: can't jump to function definitions from the console; can't step through code using just the keyboard.

(If these things have changed since I last tried it, I'd like to know.)

ihartley• 17 years ago

Have you tried opening Firebug in a new window from the window you want to monitor. This will leave the Firebug area closed on the window you're using and the net requests will collect in the Firebug window.

qeorge4• 17 years ago

I thought I was the only one, and didn't want to complain because its still a beta. The inspect feature is all but broken for me, and I don't like the new UI changes at all. Why fix what's not broken?

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!

woid2• 17 years ago

FireQuery now works also with 1.3. I've backported it recently.

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

jdbeast002• 17 years ago

sorry for being dense, but i just tried for 15 minutes to figure out how to use firequery without success. is there a firequery tutorial for dummies?

qeorge4• 17 years ago

Its really a great addon, hats off to you. I use the data() method frequently, and FireQuery is invaluable for that. Great to know I can use it with Firebug 1.3 as well.

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.

Raphael• 17 years ago

I think it stays on if you click the [-] or the status bar icon instead of the Off button.

anshul• 17 years ago

Thank you! I had noticed clicking the status bar icon but didn't really see the minus! Life's good again.

qeorge4• 17 years ago

You sir have made my day. Thank you.

tdavis• 17 years ago

There's a nice bug in it I just ran into, too: it sometimes errors on XHR connections and actually breaks the pipe in the process. Very ugly stuff.

http://groups.google.com/group/firebug/browse_thread/thread/...

paul92902• 17 years ago

FF 3.5 is sorta like XP to Vista upgrade! A lot of add-on developers have not created 3.5 compatible add-ons, even like compete.com (browser toolbar extension - gives site ranking) has not been updated and for me for SEO purposes it's annoying.

Also, FF 3.5 does not automatically zoom the text as 3.0 did. I'm probably gonna revert to 3.0.

ivank• 17 years ago

When did FF 3.0 automatically zoom text? Are you thinking of NoSquint?

3.5 remembers your zoom settings (set with ctrl + / ctrl -) for each domain.

paul92902• 17 years ago

I have a mac mini connected to a 42" LCD TV. When I would load hacker news with 3.0 that version would auto adjust the text to view that was easily readable. Now I have to use more mouse gestures (right click and motion down with mouse) to get that effect and when I go back from reading story back to hacker news I have to do the mouse gestures all over again. Sucks

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

My copy hangs all the time with "unresponsive script" errors. I just switched from 1.4 to 1.5 alpha, not sure if it's going to help.

gruseom4• 17 years ago

This post hits a nerve. I've relied on Firebug for a long time and it's been getting less stable for about a year. The problems are particularly apparent if you have largeish Javascript files (a few thousand lines). A lot of critical features intermittently stop working, things like breakpoints or being able to jump to the definition of a function. The Firebug project shows signs of having hit that disastrous inflection point where bug-fixing efforts create as many bugs as they fix.

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.

freetard3• 17 years ago

FF 3.5 with firebug 1.4 here, it works just fine. The whitelist bug (which I don't care for) will be fixed in the next release, no need to freak out about it. Now relax and go back to work :)

gruseom4• 17 years ago

no need to freak out

What are you talking about?

it works just fine

Have you tested it on my code?

Zak• 17 years ago

Am I the only one not having any problems? I'm still on FF 3.0 as I'm waiting for some other extensions to get updates. I recently updated to Firebug 1.4 and it's been working perfectly.

freetard3• 17 years ago

I'm on FF3.5 and Firebug 1.4 and it works fine too.

wenbert• 17 years ago

I got so frustrated with the new FF3.5 + Firebug problems that I switched to Safari4. It has a beautiful Develop/Web Inspector.

pkrumins• 17 years ago

Hmm. I have FF 3.5 and FB 1.4 and it works for me perfectly! Not sure why it doesn't work for others...

100k• 17 years ago

I've been frustrated by the "reload to enable" change and a general sense of FireBug 1.4 freezing more often than 1.3.

This article moved me to downgrade back to 1.3: http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.3X/firebug-1.3X.4b2...

wmwong• 17 years ago

Me and another guy both upgraded to 1.4 on FF 3.0 and we've been loosing access to console.log randomly. The only way for me to get it back is to restart FF. This is really annoying as we use it for work. Anyone else seeing this problem?

jasonkester• 17 years ago

Bad timing for this to happen. Have you guys tried the script debugging in IE8? Wow.

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.

nfriedly• 17 years ago

I agree with you, the new debugger is miles better than the old one, and hasn't crashed on me yet. However, it's still IE.

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...

abp• 17 years ago

The reviews on the add-on page look like stupid flames.. I have no problems with Firebug and JS-Debugging or anything else it does. DOM-Inspection on deep nested trees is faster then ever. I love this release.

Something's pretty broken with Firebug...

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