Comments on: Firebug and Firefox

By: Allan Beaufour

Allan Beaufour — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 14:26:43 +0000

Related to what people say about chrome/extensions DOM Inspector also work for XULRunner applications, Firebug does not.

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:19:36 +0000

Due to not using native widgets, Firebug isn’t very keyboard friendly, either. Just try navigating a DOM tree without a mouse (you can’t even tab to it). As a consequence, it somehow doesn’t feel right.

By: Mike Kaply

Mike Kaply — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:26:43 +0000

Chrome, chrome and more chrome.

Until Firebug can be used to inspect and debug chrome files and extensions, it doesn’t even come close to replacing DOM Inspector and Venkman.

By: Erik Arvidsson

Erik Arvidsson — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 02:20:32 +0000

Venkman allows us to debug code that has been eval’d (using the pretty print mode). This is a crucial feature for larger applications. Firebug just gets confused.

Firebug is also very slow at debugging large javascript files since the code it uses for displaying the formatted js is very inefficient.

By: glob

glob — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:33:13 +0000

i also love firebug but my biggest concern is it consumes (and perhaps leaks) massive amounts of memory. i’d always thought that firefox “just uses lots of memory” until i disabled the firebug extension.

until this has been resolved it isn’t suitable for inclusion.

By: matt

matt — Thu, 31 May 2007 23:16:59 +0000

I agree with pascalc, it would be good if firebug could show the built-in browser styles. Even if it was just an option that could be enabled.

By: pascalc

pascalc — Thu, 31 May 2007 22:27:35 +0000

With the DOM inspector you can view all the styles applied to an element, including the browser default styles (like resource://gre/res/forms.css), thanks to this information the computed style is more understandable than in Firebug.

By: clav

clav — Thu, 31 May 2007 22:02:12 +0000

The main advantage of DOMi is probably that it can be used for extension development too, since you can point it at chrome documents, and it understands anonymous content (from XBL).

By: Daryl

Daryl — Thu, 31 May 2007 20:44:20 +0000

Although I love Firebug, I don’t know that it’s terribly important to have it included in a distribution. Those who would use Firebug are likely to have a number of addons they install anyway, so this saves just one install. It’d probably be more of a pain to get and update the special distribution than simply to install Firebug as an extension in the first place.