
Something's pretty broken with Firebug... - geuis
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/1843
======
gruseom
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.

~~~
freetard
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 :)

~~~
gruseom
_no need to freak out_

What are you talking about?

 _it works just fine_

Have you tested it on my code?

~~~
freetard
Maybe, could you pass me the links to the bugs you filed for bugzilla? Maybe I
could help you and fix firebug. If your only problem is the whitelist thing,
then yes, it's no big deal.

~~~
gruseom
I appreciate that. Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to reproduce the bugs
without loading my code, and even then they are intermittent. They seem to
have to do with larger JS files, as I mentioned. As far as filing bug reports,
I've been waiting until we have a released product, because presumably then I
can include a URL to the public version.

I couldn't care less about the whitelist bug and don't even know what it is.
All I want is a reliable console and debugger.

Edit: oh, I just remembered another problem (because it just happened):
breakpoints or debugger statements that cause the debugger to break, but jump
to the completely wrong source location. This happens all the time and nothing
seems to help. (The recommendation to create a new FF profile, which appears
to be 80% of the advice given on the Firebug discussion group, doesn't fix
this.)

------
warfangle
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! :)

~~~
thorax
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.

~~~
fendale
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!

~~~
joshuaxls
Hrm, I still see it on the Console tab. The thing that bothers me is now
Firebug truncates long AJAX responses. I tend to work with heavy amounts of
JSON data, so this renders the new Firebug useless to me.

~~~
fendale
Just checked it, and I cannot see them on Console, only the Net tab (Firefox
3.0.12, firebug 1.4). Perhaps its different in Firefox 3.5

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qeorge
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!

~~~
woid
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

~~~
jdbeast00
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?

~~~
woid
there is probably no firequery tutorial, I thought screenshots are self-
explanatory. You can try FireQuery on this test file:
[http://github.com/darwin/firequery/blob/master/test/index.ht...](http://github.com/darwin/firequery/blob/master/test/index.html)

~~~
jdbeast00
thanks, i think i got it now. i've not used the data function before

------
chaosmachine
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.

------
alexbosworth
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
_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?

~~~
gruseom
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.)

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

~~~
ionfish
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
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.

------
tdavis
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/...](http://groups.google.com/group/firebug/browse_thread/thread/d383ffb097abb976/f70e9909a6aa5f5e)

------
jasonkester
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
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...

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

~~~
blasdel
Though Mozilla spent _years_ pushing their annoyingly useless "Web Developer
Toolbar" exclusively

~~~
donalm
Not completely useless...

Its pretty handy for disabling javascript, changing forms from POST to GET,
viewing form fields and trying different browser window sizes.

Otherwise though it does have a lot of pointless options.

------
geuis
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.

------
Zak
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.

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

------
paul9290
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
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.

~~~
paul9290
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

------
100k
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...](http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.3X/firebug-1.3X.4b2.xpi)

------
daleharvey
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
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.

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pkrumins
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...

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wmwong
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?

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abp
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.

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

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

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

