
Firebug 1.5.0 Release Details - sant0sk1
http://blog.getfirebug.com/2010/01/15/firebug-1-5-0/
======
gruseom
For about a year, Firebug was horribly unstable for me. It seemed that each
time they introduced a bunch of new features, the crashing, hanging, and
erratic behavior (e.g. breaking at a line of source code far removed from the
actual breakpoint) got worse. Happily, though, the last release before this
current one reversed that trend. It didn't eliminate the problems but it did
make them tolerable, which was a relief. I hope this one doesn't revive the
previous tradition!

I think part of the problem is that FB wasn't designed to work with large (or
even medium-sized) JS programs. We bundle all our JS into one HTTP request.
It's a few thousand lines, which is big enough to cause FB noticeable trouble.
A lot of the fancy features they've been adding are pretty useless to me; I
wish they would simply make the console and the debugger rock solid. (And fix
things like the horrible way they print arrays...)

~~~
gruseom
Just to follow up on my earlier comment: so the new Firebug crapped out the
very first time I tried to use it. I've already reverted to 1.4.

I don't understand this project. Serious web app developers are, I guess, not
their target audience.

Edit: it's not like 1.4 works either. I set breakpoints and they just get
ignored. Grrrrr.

Edit 2: so I resort to putting "debugger" keywords in my JS and Firebug breaks
into the debugger at an entirely different source location. Grrrrr ^ 2.

------
Kilimanjaro
I've been a big fan of firebug, even though I switched to Chrome I come back
to firefox just for debugging.

No, web inspector is no match for on the fly css modification to tweak a color
here and there, even editing html right there if you need it.

~~~
pavs
Yes! People always point out to me that Chrome has built-in powerful Web
Inspector and I don't have to go back to Firefox to keep using firebug. Web
Inspector _might_ be a powerful dev tool but firebug is very intuitive to me
for quick look-ups on the source. I really hope they can do a full firebug
port on chrome, this is the only thing that's stopping me from using Chrome
exclusively. But I doubt this will happen, because Chrome extension frame work
in its current form has limited functionality, unlike Firefox.

~~~
Zev
Have you (or the OP) tried Safari's (or better yet, a WebKit nightlies) Web
Inspector? Its more powerful than the one in Chrome.

~~~
mmastrac
FWIW, Chrome dev channel's inspector is approximately equivalent to the one in
webkit nightlies.

------
mumrah
They left out "Segfaults Firefox 3.5.7 on x64 ubuntu 9.10"

~~~
dryicerx
I had the same issue on x64 fedora 11, but found a workaround (although a bit
annoying one). Delete the .mozilla directory and start firefox, install
firebug, then it works. I tried messing with files left behind from the
previous firebug individually, but couldn't find a specific culprit...

Annoying bug, this is just a temporary workaround.

------
charliepark
I just upgraded to this (Leopard 10.5, FF 3.5.7), and the feature I used the
most is now borked. Right-clicking an element and selecting "inspect element",
or expanding Firebug and expanding the nested child elements (clicking the
arrow to expand the contents of the div > the form > the fieldset > the input)
is now completely broken. Has anybody else had this happen? Any fixes you can
recommend?

~~~
charliepark
In case anyone hits the same problems I did, upgrading Firefox to 3.6 seems to
have fixed it.

------
wanderr
I've been 1.5a since 1.4 was released (or since I knew about it). 1.5 is
mostly bugfixes. For my purposes 1.4 was completely unusable.

------
geuis
I've been using this since early beta. It's performance is worse than 1.3.x.
The new features are miniscule at best. I happened to open an older VM the
other day that was running FF3.0 and Firebug 1.2. I was shocked at how fast it
was compared to the newer versions. I had forgotten. They need to stop
worrying about new features and focus on speed.

~~~
toisanji
why would they allow it it to become slower than it already is? It seems like
they want more people to move away from firefox.

------
csytan
New features that I like:

\- Computed styles and DOM are now tabs when working in HTML

\- "Persist" buttons for both the Console and Net. I haven't tested it yet,
but there have been many times where it would have been very useful.

------
jdbeast00
the html inspection (outlining) works a lot better than in 1.4. several of my
sites had outlining way off in 1.4, very frustrating.

------
huherto
Is this release is better for debugging than using chrome? What do you
recommend?

