Development Blog

getfirebug.com has Firebug 1.6X.0a5. Mostly this release consists of bug fixes planned for Firebug 1.5.1.

• The break on next button moved from the main toolbar to the panel toolbar. Physically this is not a lot of distance but it allows the button to “belong” to the panel.
• The break on next button icons now depend upon the panel, with a system of badges. Thanks jabapyth!
• MozAfterPaint events now show up on the net panel time line
• Locale updates for uk-UA, hy-AM, hu-HU, cs-CZ.

jjb

Followups to the newsgroup please.

Pedro Simonetti just moved Firebug Lite 1.3 to beta. As a bonus he created a Google Chrome Extension version to make it a bit easier to use.

Firebug Lite for Google Chrome helps developers check their pages developed on Firefox for issues specific to Google Chrome, or to study Web pages that look different on the two browsers. The Lite version does not support the Net panel nor does it support Javascript debugging.

Firebug Lite is a pure Web based version of Firebug, built on a different code base than the Firefox version. In addition to Pedro’s major improvements,  he has also been evolving the code to bring it closer to the Firefox version. Eventually we hope to combine the Lite code with a new Firebug frontend for mobile and remote debugging based on a standard web debug protocol.

If you are a Google Chrome user, check out Pedro’s new release.

jjb

Followup in the newsgroup please.

Later this evening getfirebug.com will have Chromebug 1.6a4.

• Attempt to delete Chromebug contexts when windows are destroyed. Seems to be working.
• Different approach to XUL / XBL files, now can debug XBL JS
• Only change the context by user control (not when windows open)
• Better naming of Sandbox and about:blank contexts
• Hacks to deal with jetpack hacks
• consolidate code to map stack frames to contexts
• avoid the gray blank area at the bottom of Firefox when inspecting.

Overall I’m more confident of this version that any in a while.

Also available is Firebug 1.6a4. About 10 tests fail, but I don’t know how to fix them. In these cases Firefox generates errors messages without file names, line numbers, or call stacks. I don’t know if we really have test failures or not.

jjb

Please followup on firebug newsgroup or the chromebug newsgroup

The Firebug Working Group has some initial plans for Firebug 1.6 and 1.7. The short versions:

Firebug 1.6

Target April 2010, Firefox 3.6 and 3.7: Better support for Firebug extensions

Firebug 1.7

Target Sept 2010, Firefox 3.7: Internal Re-architecture

jjb

Please post follow ups on the newsgroup

When you apply the update for Firebug 1.4.5 to 1.5.0, your existing Firebug extensions also need to be updated. Users report success using

• FireQuery 0.4.1 (see post by sroussey)
• FirePHP 0.4.3 (see issue 2714)

We know this manual update is not great and we are working on a new approach for Firebug 1.6.

jjb

Please post followups to the newsgroup.

We’ve had several reports about Firefox crashing on Linux with Firebug 1.5.0. As far as we know this only happens in the unsupported 64 bit builds. We have no way to investigate this problem; we do not know if the problem has been reported to Mozilla.

If you have this problem and want to use Firebug 1.5, please install a 32 bit linux build.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A fix for one crash involving Firebug 1.5 on Ubuntu is scheduled for their Firefox 3.5.8.

UPDATE: Based on information in  Issue 2708: Firefox crash when opening Firebug, this problem occurs in 64 bit builds from linux distros like Ubuntu.  You can report the problem to your linux system provider I guess.

jjb

The Firebug Working Group proudly announces the availability of Firebug 1.5.0!

After more than 6 months of development and 36 alpha and beta releases, the new Firebug is ready. Among the major enhancements:

• Mike Radcliffe’s Inspector. A key feature, now solid as a rock,
• Jan ‘Honza’ Odvarko’s expanded and refined Net panel, with accurate timings,
• Steve Roussey’s reworking of HTML editing and entity support,
• Kevin Decker’s CSS and Style side panel improvements,
• Support for dynamic, graphical breakpoints through out Firebug.
• Tested support for the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.6

In addition to the people named above, we have had a lot of contributions from users. We especially want to thank locale contributors, we now support 32 languages.

We’ve listed the main new features and changes in the Firebug 1.5 release notes on our new wiki. Please take a few minutes to read through them and ask for clarifications. We’ll use your input to add more information.

For this release we’ve worked especially hard on quality. Our pre-release test suite continues to grow: Firebug 1.5 passes all tests on both Firefox 3.5 and 3.6. We’ve fixed a lot of bugs, while also adding enhancements requested by the community.  Ultimately this quality derives from community contributions of good bug reports with test cases. We thank everyone who takes the time to help.

The addons.mozilla.org users will be updated to 1.5.0 next week. Based on past experience, some issues will arise that our getfirebug.com users did not hit.  We expect a couple of minor update releases in the next few weeks. All new features and significant bug fixes will now appear on Firebug 1.6.

Support for Firebug extension bundles did not make it into 1.5. We are working on that now and hope to have some prototypes ready soon.

jjb

Please comment in the newsgroup.

getfirebug.com has Chromebug 1.6a3. Please update to Firebug 1.6a3 at the same time.

This version add some support for “Sandbox” scopes used by jetpack. Lots of bug fixes so generally it’s starting to work better again.

Inspect is working well, but one problem I don’t know how to fix: Firefox 3.6 gets a blank area at the bottom of the page when you inspect.

jjb

Follow up in the newsgroup please.

getfirebug.com has Firebug 1.6X.0a3. This release has the bug fixes for 1.5.0 plus our first new 1.6 feature, Jan ‘Honza’ Odvarko’s Scrolling Panels Tab Bar. This feature will be critical for users of Firebug extensions.

(I just finished a rough draft of the 1.5 release notes, so we are close to 1.5.0 now…)

jjb

Please post followups in the newsgroup

I wanted to learn more about jetpack so (duh) I tried to debug a jetpack.  In case you’ve not heard,  jetpack is a Mozilla labs project to support easy, rapid development of Firefox addons using Javascript operating in an HTML rather than XUL world. You should try the tutorial, it really is easy and rapid!

Well, as long you don’t need to debug. Seems like the debug story is writing to Firebug’s Console.

Can we have a ‘jetbug’, a Firebug-like experience for jetpack? To start we’d need to understand what is jetpack. In part it is a Firefox extension: we should use Chromebug to investigate.

I ran the jetpack ‘boom’ tutorial from the about:jetpack URL. It is very short:

jetpack.statusBar.append({
 html: "Boom<i>!</i>"
 });

Then I inspected the “Boom” addition to the status bar:

In Chromebug we can see the implementation markup:

<statusbarpanel contextmenu="_child">
<menupopup></menupopup>
<iframe type="content" src="data:text/html,Boom%3Ci%3E!%3C/i%3E"
style="overflow: hidden; height: 16px; margin-top: 2px; margin-left: 4px; margin-right: 4px; width: 30px;">
</iframe>
</statusbarpanel>

So they put an iframe into the status bar to support HTML! Cool.

Next I want to find the Javascript above.  I did not get there yet, because Chromebug got confused by seeing a scope that was not a Window or BackstagePass. After some uh, logging based debugging of Chromebug, I can now see the Jetpack “Sandbox” object:

The console looks like an interface to Firebug. You can see the jetpack object used in the tutorial. Also in the sandbox is some jquery stuff and system functions.

Unfortunately there are ten other sandboxes whose role I don’t understand and I can’t find the source shown above. But it’s a start.  (Chromebug 1.6a3 will include what I’ve learned so far).

jjb

Followups on the newsgroup please.