Firebug:
The Firebug extension for Mozilla Firefox allows the debugging, editing, and monitoring of any websites’ CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript, and provides other web development tools. Firebug’s official website has a complete guide to what it can do.
Firebug was written by Joe Hewitt, one of the original Firefox creators. The firebug plug-in YSlow is a web development tool and analyses web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. Its offers the following:
- Performance report card
- HTTP/HTML summary
- List of components in the page
- Tools including JSLint
Firebug Features:
1) ability to retrieve a Firebug-generated stack trace from JavaScript
2) ability to either customize what appears in the stack trace, or have access to the stack frames themselves for generating a trace ourselves
3) ability to register for a Firebug-provided event similar to IE’s window on error
4) high resolution timer support, if feasible (for at least Windows)
For context, Isomorphic created Smart Client, an open source Ajax RIA
platform used in heavy-duty business applications. We’re interested
in these features in part because Smart Client has a cross-platform
Developer Console that contains many Smart Client-specific diagnostic
tools, which Firebug compliments, but which would be even more
valuable if we could incorporate Firebug diagnostics directly into our
existing tools.
For example, while Firebug makes a heroic attempt to provide useful
stack traces, Smart Client’s IE stack traces are still much more
useful, because they incorporate Smart Client-specific information like
what Smart Client class a method is from, and they provide summaries of
objects that show the most relevant properties with respect to
Smart Client.
If Firebug had these featured all Ajax frameworks could create
tailored diagnostics that would be much more useful.
