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Firebug
Brent Thompson turned me onto Firebug, a Firefox plugin for inspecting and editing HTML and CSS on pages you’re viewing. This is a lot more convenient that editing the CSS and then reloading to see what the change does. You can also edit and debug Javascript on the fly and explore the DOM. Fun stuff. And the fact that it’s a plugin for Firefox means that it’s OS agnostic.
Posted by windley on January 12, 2007 11:57 AM
Comment from Joseph Scott at January 12, 2007 12:59 PM
Firebug is a tool that anyone who does any sort of web development should be familiar with. Gets my vote big time.
Comment from Jesse at January 12, 2007 10:25 PM
The best feature is the breakdown of your load times per file. It lets you figure out if you have a server-side or client-side speed issue. Using Firebug, I figured out that our project tracking application at work (dotproject, a fantastic open-source project management software) is slow because it takes a long time to load all of those JavaScript files. Instead of dropping a bunch of money on a new server, we put some more RAM into our workstations. Problem solved.
Comment from Sam Curren at January 13, 2007 3:29 PM
Firebug has been in my toolbox for months now. It is good at many things, but is absolutely essential at developing and debugging AJAX applications. You can enable AJAX request logging, and it will reveal every request, complete with request and response headers. I have done my best to block the pre-firebug AJAX development memories from my mind.
Comment from Tom at January 18, 2007 8:56 PM
I used it back in its early days, and wasn't terribly impressed. One of my developers was demoing something a couple of months ago, and showed the load time logging features in passing. I was hooked. It will also evaluate your functions to identify slowdowns, may be auto-enabled/disabled for specific sites, and has a host of other features that I'm still discovering. Highly recommended.
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