[hinkley]

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.

[unilynx]

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)

[bornfreddy]

Yup. It is quite incredible how many times Mozilla shot itself.

[hinkley]

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.

[Ajnasz]

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.