Development Blog

Firebug Working Group (FWG) is proud to announce the final Firebug 1.8 release!

Firebug 1.8 has been also uploaded to AMO, but it can take some time to appear.

Firebug 1.8 is based on Firebug 1.8b7 (12 issues fixed) that has been uploaded to AMO to update also the beta channel. We have also started Firebug 1.9a0 alpha.

Compatibility

First of all, check out the following compatibility table:

• Firefox 3.6 with Firebug 1.7.3
• Firefox 4.0 with Firebug 1.7.3
• Firefox 5.0 with Firebug 1.8 (and also Firebug 1.7.3)
• Firefox 6.0 with Firebug 1.9a0 (and Firebug 1.8 as soon as 6.0 is out)
• Firefox 7.0 with Firebug 1.9a0
• Firefox 8.0 with Firebug 1.9a0

Feature Enhancements

We have been mainly focusing on stability and performance, but there are also some feature enhancements implemented along the way.

• New console.timeStamp() method
• IP Address displayed in the Net Panel
• HTML Preview Reloaded
• Improved Script Location List
• Command Line Content Persistence across page reloads
• New DOM Panel Options
• CSS Panel Color Tooltips
• Shortcuts for Changing CSS values
• Better Support for External Editors
• Box Sizing Exposed

Check out detailed description of all enhancements with screen-shots. There are also releases notes with links to proper issue reports available on Firebug Wiki.

Internal Architecture Improved

Firebug internal architecture has been significantly improved. We started using asynchronous modules (see more about AMD). This will help us to isolate individual parts of Firebug (no more 5-10 thousands lines of source code in a single file), avoid global dependencies and make code sharing simpler. Firebug is using a module loader that is based on RequireJS.

You can also see description of all existing Firebug modules. If you are a Firebug extension developer you could also be interested in API Changes.

Firebug 1.8 still supports existing extensions based on XUL Overlays and we are also working on AMD module support API for extensions that should be finalized in Firebug 1.9

Using asynchronous modules is great change and moves Firebug much closer towards following goals:

• Better Firebug code-base organization and dependencies.
• Sharing modules (and UI!) with Firebug Lite that is running inside a web page.
• Support for restart-less Firebug installation.
• Delayed Firebug load so, it doesn’t slow down Firefox startup time.
• Better infrastructure for upcoming Firefox Electrolysis (separate processes) and remote debugging.

We are working hard to bring the best developer experience to the web and we have a lot of ideas about what to do to reach that goal, so stay tuned!

Please post feedback in the newsgroup, thanks!

Honza

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2011 at 4:49 am and is filed under Firebug Releases, Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.