Firebug: My new favorite Firefox extension!
I use a lot of Firefox extensions, but there’s a handful of them that I couldn’t do without. I now have another to add to that list (a list which I’ll post about here, another day): Firebug
This extension provides all sorts of useful features for web developers, and in the first 2 minutes of using it, I managed to track down a problem in a DHTML application that I’ve been working on for the past few months. I’ve been wrestling with some performance problems for the past few weeks, and have been getting increasingly frustrated as I tried one thing after another to optimize my code, but still ended up with unacceptable performance. Firebug provides a powerful Profiler feature, which clearly pinpointed the current source of my performance problems.
It’s also got a nice, big area for running arbitrary javascript code, has Watch capabilities, network performance info, realtime view of HTML, CSS, Script, or DOM, and all sorts of other features. The interface seems pretty usable and packs all sorts of power, without getting in my way when I don’t want to use it. Plus, there’s a new “Firebug lite”, which provides a small subset of the functionality (javascript console/logging) for non-Firefox browsers like IE and Opera. I haven’t tried that out yet, but I will soon.
Thanks go out to Stickman for posting about it on StickBlog this morning!
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