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Firebug didn't just raise the bar for web debugging, it pretty much raised the bar for all debugging tools. It leaves a great legacy with the built-in dev tools
by drderidder 9y ago
Firebug didn't just raise the bar for web debugging, it pretty much raised the bar for all debugging tools. It leaves a great legacy with the built-in dev tools. Great project.
- jgrahamc 9y agoWhoa. That's pretty hyperbolic. Firebug is definitely cool but things like SoftICE or the Visual Studio debugger were amazing.
- gcb0 9y agoDon't forgot it was mostly imitating IE6's Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. Even though it surpassed it pretty fast! go open source!
- giancarlostoro 9y agoVisual Studio did front-end web debugging back then?
- jgrahamc 9y agoThe parent claimed the following: "Firebug didn't just raise the bar for web debugging, it pretty much raised the bar for all debugging tools." I dispute the idea that Firebug raised the bar for non-web debugging tools.
- giancarlostoro 9y agoGuess I missed the latter claim.
- gcb0 9y agofirebug took a while to have a proper javascript debugger. For a long while, you could only ever have breakpoints using IE+VS... But it was a crapshot if your code had too much DOM interaction. The debugger itself would crash (and offer you to debug itself heh)
- rpeden 9y agoIt sure did. You had to use IE to do it, which some people disliked. That usually wasn't a problem, though, because you had to support IE due to its market share.
- pjmlp 9y agoYep it did. Windows had one of the first JavaScript debuggers, due to JScript. Electron already existed as MSHTML packaged apps.
- pixdamix 9y agoYeah, SoftICE, I remember buying Hackerzvoice (a French newspaper-like hacking magazine) which included SoftICE tutorials on how to crack WinRAR license verification. (for educational purposes of course) I was amazed that I could breakpoint and debug any running app. I miss SoftICE. I read this a while back from someone who work for the company which owns SoftICE copyright : https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-do-i-acquire-softice https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/...
- alasdair_ 9y agoAny idea what people use now instead of softice?
- StillBored 9y agoIt depends on what you are trying to do. Softice was good for "kernel" debugging, rather than just simple user space programs for which things like turbo debugger (and more modern solutions), were as good if not better. For windows kernel debugging, there is windbg, kd, and assorted "emulation" methods like qemu's gdb stub. Similarly for linux/kgdb/etc... OTOH, Softice had a number of OS data structure aware commands in the late 1990's which are only really available in something like windbg. In theory you could write kgdb macro's to perform most of that functionality for linux/etc but it doesn't work out of the box. Although in the end, the logical replacement for softIce, is a JTAG debugger of some form. A fair number of the ARM platforms work with DS5/Dstream which provides source level debugging with far more functionality (for example trace level timing information) than softice as an "ICE' ever did. I guess its the same for intel's ITP-XDP3/system studio products these days. Again, it depends on what your trying to debug. AKA do you need the "ICE' (aka JTAG these days) functionality, or are you just looking for a powerful kernel or user-space debugger.
- nekitamo 9y agoOllydbg on 32 bit windows x64dbg on 64 bit windows IDA Pro Debugger/GDB/LLDB on Linux/OSX/iOS/Android GDB everywhere else as StillBored said, windbg for Windows kernel debugging, but I've honestly only used it in exotic situations for .NET debugging
- jerf 9y agoThis may have been posted in 2008, but the tech it is demoing was decades (yes, plural) old by then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kuoS796vNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kuoS796vNw This video is a simple demonstration of very mature tech, not a demo of something hot and new. That's a demo of a Smalltalk environment with the programmer deliberately writing some code that crashes, going into the debugger, adding the method on the fly, and then having the original method call complete despite the method not yet having existed. It isn't quite true that there is nothing new under the tech sun... but there's certainly less new than most people seem to think.
- r00fus 9y agoFirebug was free and ubiquitous. Unless you were in a MS shop, the likelihood of having Visual Studio are minimal. Firebug was a quantum leap in terms of HTTP/JS debugging.
- irrational 9y agoHuh, I've never heard of either of those.
- drderidder 9y agoNot really. It's not that other debuggers didn't provide some of those features and were very good at, say, stepping through program logic. I've spent many years using other debugging tools for C/C++ and Java, and although there are some good IDE's out there, firebug's capability to analyze everything from logic to object models to network activity and visual presentation details, in such a well-integrated and user-friendly way was frankly unprecedented.
- sli 9y agoI'd say Firebug did for browser debugging what jQuery did for closing the gaps between browsers.
- hinkley 9y agoI often argue that Firebug is the reason Firefox is still around. It was easier to develop on Firefox and then debug on IE. So a lot of websites worked on Firefox even if the management team didn't care (or even, in our case, when they told us not to support Firefox and we nodded and did it anyway)
- cesarb 9y ago> It was easier to develop on Firefox and then debug on IE. A long time ago, the company I worked at had a website which worked only on IE, because it needed a specific ActiveX control for streaming video. But even though it would never work on Firefox, the developers still made as much of the site as possible work on Firefox, because whenever IE popped up an unhelpful error message ("Object expected" and others), reproducing the error on Firefox gave a useful error message.
- chrismorgan 9y agoI find this to still be true today of Firefox’s error messages versus those of other browsers, though Chrome’s aren’t as bad as IE’s were.
- bdcravens 9y agoI think a smaller reason is that Selenium for the longest time supported Firefox as the simplest default.
- homero 9y ago100% why I didn't even consider trying another browser
- flukus 9y ago> or even, in our case, when they told us not to support Firefox and we nodded and did it anyway The same happened to me at one particularly bad place I worked. Even more amusing is that we we're writing a web crawler based product and without inspecting the crawled sites in firebug our product wouldn't have existed at all.
- 9y ago