[commandlinefan]

> didn't work well.

And nearly impossible to debug on top of that. Firebug didn't come around until 2005, and AFAIK that was the first interactive debugger for Javascript. In fact, I remember spending a lot of time debugging without even console.log() support - window.alert() was the only weapon you had for the longest time. Not to mention every Javascript implementation's frustrating habit of just throwing up a blank page instead of an error message if anything was wrong...

[johannes1234321]

Before firebug there was Venkman debugger (mind the Ghostbusters theme) as Firefox (or Firebird and Netscape Navigator 9) as well as Thunderbird and their other components where built using JavaScript+XUL (pronounced Zool, as in Ghostbusters)

[strbean]

And god forbid you got yourself in an alert() loop!