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Things instantly became real when firebug for IE came out. To me that one tool made a front end web development career a viable option. Do y'all remember JS bef
by emehrkay 9y ago
Things instantly became real when firebug for IE came out. To me that one tool made a front end web development career a viable option. Do y'all remember JS before Firebug? ouch
- snapetom 9y agoalert()
- drawkbox 9y agoOr, easier without popups, logging to a div (hidden or at the bottom) that you could expand/open up to see output. Firebug was revolutionary not only for the console but the inspect tool was very needed as layouts and CSS progressed where outputs weren't enough.
- nathancahill 9y agodocument.write() cringe
- gcb0 9y agoThere was a very capable javascript debugger as a mozilla plugin (don't think it was an addon), years before firebug/browsers dev tools had one. It don't remember the name, it was something with a V.
- rkwz 9y agoVenkman Debugger? https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/ https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/
- fzzzy 9y agoVenkman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venkman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venkman
- carussell 9y agoFirebug was neither the first for step-by-step JS debugging, nor for poking at the DOM. Those two things were within the purview of Venkman—the original Mozilla JS debugger—and the DOM Inspector—Firebug's predecessor created in 2001 by Joe Hewitt, an ex-Netscape/AOL employee and the original author of Firebug itself. Honza's timeline is off. I've left a note in the blog comments about this.
- bentaber 9y agoHow about MODI - the mouseover DOM inspector loaded as a favelet. http://slayeroffice.com/?c=/content/tools/modi.html http://slayeroffice.com/?c=/content/tools/modi.html
- Piskvorrr 9y agoOh geez, the memories. And not happy memories, either. Those were truly the Dark Ages.
- StillBored 9y agoWhich didn't help much when there was a syntax error somewhere close by causing the browser to silently terminate parsing/executing the code. At least these days the browsers tend to dump error messages into the console when this happens... In theory that could have been caught by a good jslint/syntax checker but those were a few years in the future too. Early, JS development really sucked, its only slightly better today..
- majewsky 9y ago> Which didn't help much when there was a syntax error somewhere close by causing the browser to silently terminate parsing/executing the code. I recall a dramatic bug where, in 2012, I rolled out a new version of a web GUI with some JS mixed in it to an intranet audience of IE 7 and Firefox users. It initially looked good, but then reports came in that IE users couldn't use one of the buttons. After much debugging and confusion, it turned out that there was a trailing comma at the end of an array literal (i.e. `[1,2,3,]` instead of `[1,2,3]`). Firefox accepted that, but IE 7 didn't. (I think IE 8 added support for trailing commas.)
- maaaats 9y agoIt is not async, though. Remember being young and having a bug I couldn't reproduce when alerting the state.
- masklinn 9y ago> Do y'all remember JS before Firebug? ouch Most people debugged with alerts or document.write-ing in the page. The "wokest" were aware of Venkman (Moz/FF), Script Editor (IE) and the Visual Studio IE integration (also IE), all of which were pretty much just JS debuggers. Venkman worked the best but the UX was a horrendous mess, SE and VS were less visually messy but (likely due to IE) frequently got lost entirely and were completely unable to debug the JS toplevel ("and "modules" were not really a thing back then, so much of your code would live in the JS toplevel). This was also the epoch of Drip, an IE webview which would just reload a page over and over checking for IE's infamous DOM leaks. God I so don't miss it. Firebug was definitely a pivotal moment, a complete perspective shift for the field.
- irrational 9y agoalert("JS debugging was so fun before firebug!");