Development Blog

getfirebug.com has Firebug 1.5a7. This release has one new small feature for users who have sites that generate unique URLs: “Activate Same Origin”. When this option is on, all pages with the same “origin” as an active page will be active. So, for example, if you open Firebug on bar.foo.com, then visiit foo.com or baz.foo.com, Firebug will be open. (This is close to the same-origin policy used by the browser).

Also in this version are some important bug fixes:

• Issue 1894: CSS-edit removes declaration if page with specific javascript.
• Issue 1879: nsIStreamListener.onDataAvailable throws exception
• Issue 882: console.log() reports wrong source file and line number

All of this will appear in Firebug 1.4.0, “soon”. Note that if you install 1.5 it should work well but updates will begin to diverge from 1.4 and at that point it will be, well, ‘alpha’ quality.

jjb

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getfirebug.com has released Firebug 1.4b3 for Firefox 3.0 and 3.5. This version fixes a number of bugs that could have affected a lot of folks.

Our TODO list for 1.4 is now pretty short:

1. Make the test driver 100% reliable (three tests fail occasionally)
2. Internationalization
3. Fix the blocking bugs,
4. Add more bugs to the list of blocking bugs,
   
5. Go to step 3.

If you use Firebug and you want to be sure that 1.4 works for you,  now is the time to test is out.

jjb

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Somehow in all of the excitement about the upcoming Firefox 3.5 release we neglected to talk up Firefox 3.0 as the preferred browser for using Firebug 1.4 beta versions.

Firebug 1.4 was developed on Firefox 3.0 and we have extensive experience with this combination. For most Firebug users, Firebug 1.4 on Firefox 3.0 is the best choice.

We have recent shifted our development on to Firefox 3.5 and by the time it comes out we expect Firebug 1.4 to be solid on this browser.

jjb

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I  downloaded FireFox release candidate 3.5RC1 build2 for win32 and installed Firebug 1.4Xb2, then ran our FBTests. 424 pass, 1 fail (net/1764). More important, this version does not crash if you hit a breakpoint and put your mouse on the Script panel.  Looks like that problem is behind us.

To get this version, install Firefox 3.5b4 and then immediately use Firefox > Help  > CheckForUpdates and the RC1 will be installed.

jjb

If you are keen to use Firebug with pre-release versions of Firefox 3.5, I suggest you use the nightly build from June 5.

Firefox 3.5b4 had a number of problems that have been fixed since it was released. So in general the 3.5 nightly builds have been steadily improving. Unfortunately a change on June 6 causes Firefox to crash if you breakpoint in Firebug and bring the mouse over the script panel.

On the Firebug side, we are working towards integrated testing with Firefox so we can prevent this in future.

jjb

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getfirebug.com has Firebug 1.5X.0a3. This is the first Firebug release that passes all of our “FBTests”, a collection of tests mostly inspired by user issues or new features.  Last week, using 1.4a31, we passed all the tests running under Firefox 3.0.10; now we pass using the Firefox 3.5 nightly build, very close to the Firefox version that will be released as Firefox 3.5 Preview in the next 24 hours.

At this point can now turn the Firebug 1.4 branch over to Jan “Honza” Odvarko for the 1.4 beta releases. The rest of the development team will commit to branches/firebug1.5 and Honza will pick from the commits there to move the beta forward.  This way Honza will be able to keep a steady improvement to the final release of 1.4.

We will try to bring out a 1.5a release ahead of every 1.4b release, both with similar code as a extra check to help the beta.  So the content of 1.5a3 is a preview of the 1.4b release we hope to have tomorrow.

jjb

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getfirebug.com has released Firebug 1.4a31. It passes ‘all’ of our FBTests (43 test files, 443 unit tests) on Firefox 3.0.10.

On Firefox 3.5 nightly build we still have about 20 failing tests. My guess is that most of these are caused by changes in the order of events between 3.0 and 3.5. I think what is happening is that our test-verification code is running before the Firebug test code runs, so the test fails the verify, then the test code runs correctly. But of course guessing is exactly what test cases are meant to prevent…

jjb

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Jan ‘Honza’ Odvarko has a great new page describing the features of the Firebug Net panel

jjb

Firebug’s most famous feature has to be ‘inspect’, the ability to mouse over the UI and have the debugger show you the UI content underneath. Other development tools have this ability, but Joe Hewitt’s integration of this feature into Firebug was excellent.

Well except for one annoying bug: sometimes the indicator frame was off set from the actual element. This was rarely seen, but since inspect is such a valuable feature, it resulted in at least 6 bug reports and numerous complaints on the newsgroup.

I took a stab at it a while back, but there were lots of cases which seemed different and lots of paths in the code.

Luckily Mike Radcliffe decided to take a break from excellent work on Firebug Lite to take a look. He started by gathering up all the test cases in to issue 1688. He had a hint from bug 356665 to apply getBoundingClientBox. Then presto, we have a fix in Firebug 1.4a24.

Nice work Mike.

jjb

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Firebug 1.4.0a23 is out.  It includes couple of additions to the status bar icon context menu.

Here’s the full line up now:

• Open Firebug in New Window. aka ‘detach’. as before.
• Clear Console. Well it’s been there since 1.o…
• Reset All Firebug Options. Changes all of the Firebug options back to their default values. We use this in testing Firebug, so it may help you if something odd is happening. BTW, no confirm on this one. I’d like to have a confirm window that listed all of the options. Someday.
• Enable All Panels. Enables Console, Script, and Net panels. Extensions could use it too. Does not reload the page.
• Disable All Panels. opposite of enable.
• Off for all web pages. Closes all Firebug instances, erases all memory of which pages had Firebug open in the past. Also used for testing; also wish it had a confirm.
• On for all web pages. Opens Firebug on all pages; does not use the page-annotation for remembering which pages are open.
• Minimized: the list of pages with Firebug active but minimized. Clicking on an entry will select that tab and restore Firebug into the browser.

To go with the new Context menu is a new Tooltip. As before the Firebug version is available here. Also the activation status of the panels. If all three panels are off, the Firebug icon should be gray. Otherwise it should be orange (as before). Then the number of detached (none in this case), minimized, and total Firebug web pages are shown. The number of minimized pages should match the list in the context menu.

Please post follow-ups to the newsgroup.

jjb