Firebug 1.12 – New Features (opens in new tab)

Yeah, firebug still has quite a lot of polish compared to the others.

Perhaps it has to do with the contributors being expert UI developers, and firebug developers second. Whereas the other tools are mostly developed by employees who do full time dev tool development, but not so much work using the tools.

But I know others mostly prefer chrome tools. The same people often get stuck in firebug or in IE dev tools.

Anyway... GREAT WORK FIREBUG TEAM! xo

I think Firebug is superior to the CDT, but unfortunately Firefox is terrible on modern Macs- especially with HiDPI.

Even the cookies. It's been in webkit for a while. SO USEFUL.

You can also use it to leech stuff from login/captcha protected download areas like rapidshare or the apple dev center. No more failed browser downloads of 1gig files! Just add -C to your curl command!

Well Chrome had this feature for a long time. Personally I don't find it much useful. But to me the killer feature of firebug is that when you open an XHR entry in new tab it opens the tab with all POST variables. Super handy when debugging REST api.

"Copy as cURL" is pretty much the greatest addition to web dev/debugging since I started like 15 years ago..

Firefox's, certainly. It would be good if you reported it on Bugzilla.

When you enter debug mode in SpiderMonkey most (all? I forget) jit'ing and optimizations won't happen; code becomes a lot slower. The new debugging api allows you to debug specific tabs, while the old one would force all of the browser (including the chrome js that handles the browser's UI) to enter debug mode and the whole browser gets slow.

Because Honza is working on porting firebug to the new debugger API, it will get faster, and so will all of firefox when you are using firebug.

IIRC, Honza is not just working on porting from the old api to the new one, but also on top of our remote debugging protocol. This means that we improve the debugging server, and both the native tools and firebug get better. Plus, you'll be able to use firebug on your laptop, connected remotely to firefox on your android phone, or firefox os.

Not really, no. There was some talk about adding a Firebug panel to the built-in tools, but nothing has really come from it, and any deeper UI integration is probably out of the question for being too much work. But suggestions about how to make it better are still welcome, of course.

The main thing we have gotten out of the new devtools are new cool APIs, e.g. for debugging, paint flashing, CSS auto-completion, profiling (though we haven't gotten around to using most of them yet).

Not yet, though it's something I suggested some time ago: http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=4888. Let's see if we can get that for the next version.