5 ms·

In 2008, when IE7 came out, I cried of joy. I turned 22 that year, so the 7 years with only IE6 and Firefox was a significant chunk of my life. Firefox showed u

In 2008, when IE7 came out, I cried of joy. I turned 22 that year, so the 7 years with only IE6 and Firefox was a significant chunk of my life. Firefox showed us that the web wasn't finished and could still be improved, and then came Firebug which made Firefox first web dev the obvious choice. But the vast majority still used IE6, so there was always a miserable step in the project of fixing all the IE bugs. After doing it for years and knowing your foe, it was by then a relatively quick and manageable experience. The real pain was in knowing all the CSS2 features and other goodies that could never be used. Seeing Microsoft recognizing that, yes indeed, the web wasn't finished in 2001 was actually an emotional moment at that point. So yeah, the situation is without doubt much better now. I think people tend to forget (or aren't aware) that Microsoft actively said "there's no more work to be done here" and stopped all progress for 7 years. There's been some progress on the web since 2014, as a point of comparison.

mattmanser 6y ago
I've had to say this a fair few times here, but I'll keep saying it. IEDevToolbar, which Firebug was pretty much a clone of, came out a year before Firebug. And it took Firebug years to catch up in feature parity, as far as I remember. So, firebug didn't make it the dev tool of choice. We all just hated microsoft. And tabbed browsing was great.
- oxymoron 6y ago
  I was young and dogmatic, so I did admittedly despise Microsoft back then. I can't recall I ever heard of IEDevToolbar, though. Did it really feature the DOM tree view where you could do CSS manipulation? I always had the impression that it was a Firebug invention, but I could be wrong about that.
  - treve 6y ago
    The DOM inspector view in Firefox predates Firebug by years. My memory might be a bit shaky, but it may even have existed in Mozilla Web Browser? It really looked like a 'DOM tree/tree of Javascript classes' though, not really like the inspector we have today.
- Klonoar 6y ago
  What? I used that IE toolbar setup for years, and it _never_ worked as well as Firebug did.

mattmanser 6y ago

I've had to say this a fair few times here, but I'll keep saying it. IEDevToolbar, which Firebug was pretty much a clone of, came out a year before Firebug. And it took Firebug years to catch up in feature parity, as far as I remember. So, firebug didn't make it the dev tool of choice. We all just hated microsoft. And tabbed browsing was great.

oxymoron 6y ago
I was young and dogmatic, so I did admittedly despise Microsoft back then. I can't recall I ever heard of IEDevToolbar, though. Did it really feature the DOM tree view where you could do CSS manipulation? I always had the impression that it was a Firebug invention, but I could be wrong about that.
- treve 6y ago
  The DOM inspector view in Firefox predates Firebug by years. My memory might be a bit shaky, but it may even have existed in Mozilla Web Browser? It really looked like a 'DOM tree/tree of Javascript classes' though, not really like the inspector we have today.
Klonoar 6y ago
What? I used that IE toolbar setup for years, and it _never_ worked as well as Firebug did.