This article was written on January 26, 2007 by CyberNet.
My oh my how the time flies. It seems like only yesterday I was writing about the Firebug extension for Firefox and singing its praises about how much it helps out when working on websites. The time has come to move it out of Beta and into the hands of millions of people…watch out because Firebug 1.0 has been unleashed! 
If you don’t design websites then this probably won’t be the most useful tool for you, but even if you just do some casual HTML coding here and there I am sure that you would find a use for it. It can do everything from monitor network activity to figure out what elements are taking forever and a day to load, as well as tweaking the layout so that everything looks exactly how you want it to…without even having to refresh the page after making a change.
Take a look at all the features it has to offer (click on any of the links for more information on that topic).
- Just the way you like it – Firebug is always just a keystroke away, but it never gets in your way. You can open Firebug in a separate window, or as a bar at the bottom of your browser. Firebug also gives you fine-grained control over which websites you want to enable it for.
- Inspect and edit HTML – Firebug makes it simple to find HTML elements buried deep in the page. Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, Firebug gives you a wealth of information, and lets you edit the HTML live.
- Tweak CSS to perfection – Firebug’s CSS tabs tell you everything you need to know about the styles in your web pages, and if you don’t like what it’s telling you, you can make changes and see them take effect instantly.
- Visualize CSS metrics – When your CSS boxes aren’t lining up correctly it can be difficult to understand why. Let Firebug be your eyes and it will measure and illustrate all the offsets, margins, borders, padding, and sizes for you.
- Monitor network activity – Your pages are taking a long time to load, but why? Did you go crazy and write too much JavaScript? Did you forget to compress your images? Are your ad partner’s servers taking a siesta? Firebug breaks it all down for you file-by-file.
- Debug and profile JavaScript – Firebug includes a powerful JavaScript debugger that lets you pause execution at any time and have look at the state of the world. If your code is a little sluggish, use the JavaScript profiler to measure performance and find bottlenecks fast.
- Quickly find errors – When things go wrong, Firebug lets you know immediately and gives you detailed and useful information about errors in JavaScript, CSS, and XML.
- Explore the DOM – The Document Object Model is a great big hierarchy of objects and functions just waiting to be tickled by JavaScript. Firebug helps you find DOM objects quickly and then edit them on the fly.
- Execute JavaScript on the fly – The command line is one of the oldest tools in the programming toolbox. Firebug gives you a good ol’ fashioned command line for JavaScript complete with very modern amenities.
- Logging for JavaScript – Having a fancy JavaScript debugger is great, but sometimes the fastest way to find bugs is just to dump as much information to the console as you can. Firebug gives you a set of powerful logging functions that help you get answers fast.
This isn’t exactly an extension that I use all of the time so I have placed it in a separate profile that I run Firefox with when testing out websites. I’ve got a few different extensions in that profile like ColorZilla for matching colors, MeasureIt to know exactly how big something is, and View Source Chart to make looking at source code a little easier. I never felt it necessary to install these extensions in my primary profile because I only used them once in awhile, so I created a separate profile and threw Firebug in there as well.
One of the things I use the most in Firebug is modifying the CSS file to get things to line up correctly. After you change something in the CSS file it will instantly be adjusted on the screen, which means debugging layout problems is a million times easier.
I can say from experience that doing any kind of Web development work without the right tools is like cutting a steak with a spoon…sure it can be done but it takes longer than it should.
Thanks to Natmaster for the tip!
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