From my point of view it was really a game changer. The first time debugging and understanding web-applications became accessible. Probably all browser dev tools were inspired by this tool
Firebug is the reason Firefox broke IE’s crown. On one project we had management tell us specifically not to support Mozilla. Fuck you man. We get the software running on Mozilla first because it’s the only place we can debug properly. Then we fix whatever IE bugs are left over by dead reconning. We’re still going to be Mozilla first, we just won’t tell you about it anymore. And you just lost some trustworthiness so good luck convincing us of something difficult next time.
I still think the Mozilla team did Firebug a dirty by reimplementing what was an inferior version instead of bringing it home.
Exactly that. When Mozilla started reimplementing it, it seemed somehow error stack traces started breaking for both firebug and the horrible builtin developer tools
That's when we switched to Chrome for debugging, and only come back to Firefox to debug endless loops and stack overflows (because their Javascript VM is still better at being able to suspend/trace those)
Well, Mozilla itself was the result of a failed attempt at a rewrite. Jamie Zawinski decided that being a bar owner was a better career option shortly after that experience.
It’s hard to tell with autodidacts if they really got pissed off about something or just needed an excuse to deep dive into something completely unrelated, and I would definitely peg him as one.
Firefox 1(?) already had the error console, which told the _correct line_ where the error happened with more meaningful messages. Unlike IE where the message was something like `Unknown error at line 10203` when you had only a big HTML table and some inline JS.
That was already a big improvement, but then Firebug was another dimension.
> Probably all browser dev tools were inspired by this tool
Joe Hewitt begat DOM Inspector[1], which, after Hewitt left Netscape, begat Firebug (originally "FireBug"), and then pretty much every other Web developer tool began as an attempt to create something that could compete with what was available in the Mozilla ecosystem.
It certainly changed my life when I saw it for the first time. In fact, I do remember the exact situation when I was shown Firebug, and my realization that my live as a (then) frontend developer would change for the better from that moment on.
I can't even comprehend how anybody was able to do Javascript development pre-Firebug. I dabbled in client-side web development a bit in the early days of IE and found that the default behavior of a Javascript-enabled page when it encountered an error was to render a blank page and not log or report an error anywhere. I immediately retreated back to server-side development and didn't go back for years.
I taught myself programming with ASP Classic (VBScript) completely unaware of debuggers and it was normal to dump variable values to the output to try understand what was happening.
I did the same with PHP and initially the same with JavaScript.
However, once I learnt how to debug in Chrome’s dev tools, the idea of working without a debugger for any programming became unthinkable.
Actually, console.print was a later addition - when I started looking at Javascript, you could only do alerts, or you could call "status" to display something in the lower part of the frame. And if you accidentally alert()-ed inside a loop...
Still, I can't comprehend how you could develop anything in Javascript with just console.print either. You have my respect and admiration.
I remember there being a console window in the late 90s... don't remember what the full functionality was at the time however. Maybe it only showed warnings/exceptions?
It wasn't too dissimilar to developing a gui app, you could print to the console, raise a dialog, or if you wanted to be fancy implement a log with a window or pane to show them. Logging is what I use today for backend systems. It is usually enough, only breaking out a debugger once or twice a year.
Firebug enabled me to be a "real" web developer. Prior to that I was just slinging ASPX files with no real idea what I was doing. This tool was the gold standard for powerful developer tools that aren't overly complicated.
I still think the Mozilla team did Firebug a dirty by reimplementing what was an inferior version instead of bringing it home.