Development Blog

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.

Following a long discussion about Firefox Themes vs the new Persona technology, Mike Connor from the Firefox team explains on his blog why Firefox plans to migrate developers from the current theme and extension systems to personas and jetpacks.  Since we are a Firefox extension, you might wonder How will this affect Firebug?

I don’t think these changes will have a big impact on Firebug.  Firefox will continue to support extensions while the jetpack technology matures.  We can adapt as we go along.

I don’t expect we will adapt towards the jetpack solution however. Jetpacks are designed to broaden the number of addons beyond the current 8000; they make small add-ons much easier to build and maintain. As a very large add-on with a huge API contact area over the mozilla code, Firebug is way out of their design space.

Instead I expect our adaptation will be steal some ideas from jetpack and apply them to Firebug and to move away from aspects of the extension system that Firefox wants to drop first. Hopefully we will hear more about what is on the hit list. Based on the discussion linked above, XUL overlays and the install/update technology would be on the list.

We can live without the XUL overlays.  The vast majority of Firebug code is HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The panel tabs and tool bars are XUL/XBL but the overlay part is just two files.  We could adapt Firebug’s domplate technology generate the XUL.

Similarly the install/update technology is not a big deal. In fact I am currently working on an alternative solution to the add-on compatibility problem. However, I am trying a different strategy than the jetpack team because I have different design goals. I am aiming for users to see only a few choices, by bundling Firebug extensions together. (I’m using the cutesy name ‘swarm‘ for these bundles).  I want users to know that the extensions in the swarm work together (or at least don’t break Firefox or Firebug).  So the swarm will be co-tested with Firebug and the entire swarm will install and update as a unit. I believe this will be a big boost to Firebug extension developers as well as providing our own alternative to the Firefox update technology as it slowly fades away.

In the big picture, the evolution of Firefox’s extension system does not stand out as a significant worry.  We have the shift of Firefox to multi-process, the rising need for debugging mobile web, and many untapped and exciting new features to focus on.

jjb

Followups on the newsgroup please.

getfirebug.com has Firebug 1.5X.0b9 and the equivalent version without tracing, Firebug 1.5.0b9.

In addition to the bugs fixed and released with Firebug 1.6a2, we have a few more fixes since then.

Please try this version. Unless we hear about serious bugs, we will create the release documentation and then 1.5 will be done.

Users of Firebug 1.5X will be updated to the detraced version 1.5.0b9, then to 1.5.0 when its ready. If you want to use the tracing version, please install Firebug 1.6a2.

jjb

Follow up on the newsgroup please.

getfirebug.com has Firebug 1.6a2. This release is very similar to what will be in 1.5b9, but we want to double check our work for that release as it will be close to the end for 1.5.

On Firefox 3.6 we fail 6 tests, none are point to real Firebug problems. Three fail because of Firefox bug 535699, which cause our testing framework to give the error message:

Permission denied for to get property Function.__parent__ from <>.

http://getfirebug.com/tests/content/net/1862/issue1862.html

Line 34

One is caused by bug 536137, which has a fix. The other two are some problem in our testing framework. Needs work.

The 24 bugs fixed in this release, are labeled fixed1.6a2.

jjb

Please followup on the newsgroup.

getfirebug.com has Firebug 1.6a1, the first release of our new branch, fbug/branches/firebug1.6. No new features yet, this is just our starting point and our way of checking patches that will be ported to Firebug 1.5. (BTW Firebug 1.5b9 should be out soon, and we expect it to be the last beta).

Firebug 1.6 will support Firefox 3.6 and 3.7, at least for now. We might later decide to focus Firebug 1.6 on features available only in Firefox 3.7.  Many of the new features we plan for 1.6 require work in Firefox that probably will not be added to Firefox 3.6.

Users currently on Firebug 1.5 will not be automatically updated to Firebug 1.6.

Chromebug 1.6a1 is also available.

jjb

Followup on the newsgroup please.