Firebug is a discontinued

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

extension for

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current a ...

that facilitated the live

debugging In computer programming and software development, debugging is the process of finding and resolving ''bugs'' (defects or problems that prevent correct operation) within computer programs, software, or systems. Debugging tactics can involve in ...

, editing, and monitoring of any website's

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone t ...

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

, DOM,

XHR XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is an API in the form of an object whose methods transfer data between a web browser and a web server. The object is provided by the browser's JavaScript environment. Particularly, retrieval of data from XHR for the purpose o ...

, and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

History

Firebug was licensed under the

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD li ...

and was initially written in January 2006 by Joe Hewitt, one of the original Firefox creators. The Firebug Working Group oversaw the open source development and extension of Firebug. It had two major implementations: an extension for Mozilla Firefox and a

bookmarklet A bookmarklet is a bookmark stored in a web browser that contains JavaScript commands that add new features to the browser. They are stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page. Bookmarklets are usually small ...

implementation called Firebug Lite which can be used with

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macO ...

. In addition to debugging web pages, Firebug was used for web security testing and web page performance analysis. Firebug has been deprecated in favor of the integrated developer tools added to Firefox itself, whose functionality has been unified with those of Firebug. As Firefox 57 no longer supports XUL add-ons, Firebug is no longer compatible.

Version history

Version 2.0

Firebug 2.0 introduced many new features to the Firebug extension including JavaScript

syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that are used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colours and fonts according to the category of terms. ...

, pretty print for minified JavaScript code, and a DOM Event Inspector to handle all

event handler In programming and software design, an event is an action or occurrence recognized by software, often originating asynchronously from the external environment, that may be handled by the software. Computer events can be generated or triggered ...

s on a web page. Additionally, users can search for page elements using CSS selectors in the search bar. The debugging tool now allows users to inspect JavaScript expressions as they are evaluated. Moreover, users can inspect values returned from JavaScript functions. It also adds the ability to create new HTML attributes for existing HTML elements.

Version 3.0

On November 10, 2014, Firebug 3.0 was announced and an alpha was made available to the public. This version was to feature a new theme and would have focused on user experience.

Features

Firebug makes changes immediately and gives constant feedback to the user. All editors in Firebug support

autocomplete Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the tab ...

. The Firebug command line accepts commands written in JavaScript. The result of executing each command is displayed in the console, appearing as hyperlinks. The Firebug application contains multiple windows, splitting related features to a common window. Firebug also allows users to view the download time for individual files. It separates different types of objects, such as JavaScript files and images, and can determined which files are loaded from a browser's cache. Firebug also features the ability to examine HTTP headers and time stamps relative to when an HTTP request is made. Its net panel can monitor URLs that the browser requests, such as external CSS, JavaScript, and image files.

HTML and CSS

The HTML and CSS tools allow for the inspection and editing of HTML and CSS elements on a web page. Later versions of Firebug allow users to see live changes to the CSS. Visualization of CSS elements is shown while inspecting HTML elements. The Firebug layout tab is used to display and manipulate CSS property values. Furthermore, users can click on any visible HTML elements on a web page to access its CSS property values.

JavaScript Console

Firebug's script tab enables users to set breakpoints and step through lines of code. Additionally, Firebug can navigate directly to a line of JavaScript code, watch expressions, call stacks, and launch the debugger in the event an error occurs during execution. Firebug can also log errors. Logging uses a Firebug JavaScript API. Firebug's JavaScript panel can log errors, profile function calls, and enable the developer to run arbitrary JavaScript. Firebug allows users to run JavaScript code through the command line and allows the user to log errors that occur in the JavaScript, CSS, and XML. Firebug provides a separate text editor to modify the JavaScript and see immediate results on the user's browser. As provided in an update, the JavaScript command line features an autocomplete function. The text editor also provides the ability to write full functions. Firebug requires a user to refresh a web page in the event of a crash.

Extensions

Many extensions have been made to enhance Firebug. Since Firebug is open source, users can contribute their own extensions to the Firebug community.

References

External links

* {{Mozilla JavaScript programming tools Web scraping Free software 2006 software Firefox extensions merged to Firefox