Any web developer worth their salt will want to have this Firefox extension in their toolbox. Once you’ve used FireBug you’ll never want to work without it!
Some Features:
(features copied verbatim from the FireBug site)
- Logging for web pages
- Web developers have suffered with “alert debugging” for centuries. If you enjoy clicking the “Ok” button 40,000 times a day, FireBug is not for you. Otherwise, you’ll enjoy having the ability to log messages from JavaScript in your web page directly to the FireBug console.
- JavaScript Debugging
- Want to stop your JavaScript and step through it line by line? No need to fire up a big fat debugger. FireBug includes a simple lightweight way to set breakpoints in your scripts and examine every step of execution.
- Errors at your fingertips
- Nobody likes to see errors in their web pages, but with FireBug you won’t mind as much. FireBug adds a little icon to the Firefox status bar which tells you if your page is busted. Open up the FireBug panel and you’re looking at the errors that occurred in that page, and only that page. No more digging through the muddy pile of errors in the JavaScript Console window.
- Inspectors galore
- Elements and styles and events, oh my. There’s a lot going on behind the curtain of a web page. FireBug’s inspectors let you stroll lazily through the DOM using the familiar hyperlink model of the web. If you see an object reference, you can click it to inspect it.
- Command line
- If you enjoy “alert debugging” then you probably also enjoy typing “javascript: ” urls in the location bar all day. If not, then you’ll enjoy using FireBug’s JavaScript command line instead.
- Ajax Request Spy
- If you feel hip every time you fire off an XMLHttpRequest on your Ajax website, FireBug will secure your place amongst the avante garde. The FireBug console can log all Ajax request traffic as it happens, and allows you to inspect the responses.
- Live Editing
- It’s no fun just looking at the DOM. FireBug’s inspectors let you edit some parts of the DOM. More editing features to come in a future version…
So what are you waiting for? Get FireBug!
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