FireBug 1.0 Beta released.

Posted in Programming, Web Design, Web and technology by Khaled on December 5th, 2006

As you all now I am a big fan of FireFox mainly because it is modern, standards compliant, and very extensible and useful for New Media developers and Web designers. One great Add-on for FireFox is FireBug.

FireBug is a noteworthy add-on for Mozilla FireFox, I’ve been using it since a couple of months now and I think it is an outstanding tool for web developers and programmers. Now that version 1.0 Beta was released it’s become a “must have” extension.

With FireBug you are able to inspect, modify, debug and edit CSS, HTML, and JavaScript of any page you want. Now you can open FireBug in its own separate window, you can change the CSS of your page and see it work immediately, the FireBug DOM inspector’s CSS tab displays all the CSS rules for all of the page elements, it even shows the inherited CSS properties. Moreover, if you have CSS boxes that are not lining up correctly you can use the rulers, the guides and the shaded boxes of the layout tab to inspect all the margins, borders, paddings… and this is really great and time saving.

The FireBug JavaScript debugger is very powerful, yet it is very handy and easy to use. With this debugger you can pause the execution of the script at any time in order to monitor what’s going on. On the other hand the FireBug JavaScript profiler is a wonderful tool to inspect performance, tweak it and catch bottlenecks.

All in all it is a wonderful plug-in for Firefox, that helps you to improve you productivity and your work flow, it reveals detailed reports about all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and even XML errors. But the best thing is yet to come… FireBug is FREE!! Joe Hewitt, the man behind this fabulous bug, was thinking that the 1.0 release will be a commercial product, unlike the previous versions, but he finally dropped that idea and decided that the FireBug extension “will remain free and open source” and will be released under the same tri-license used by FireFox (MPL/GPL/LGPL).

Thanks Joe! If you like FireBug (I am sure you will) don’t forget to donate to the project to keep it running and alive. Go and Donate!