20 ms·

Firebug. Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Debugging JS in IE6 was like trying to build a house blindfolded with both arms ti

Firebug. Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Debugging JS in IE6 was like trying to build a house blindfolded with both arms tied behind your back. Firebug is when JS went from just a web augmentation toy that could silently fail and your web page would still mostly function to becoming a critical function for a web page (many will see this as all a big mistake).

zachruss92 6y ago
I miss Firebug. Simpler times...
- Minor49er 6y ago
  Same here. I miss when I could inspect network headers from the console without having to go over to the Network tab. Updating HTML in realtime without committing to an edit was also really handy since I wouldn't lose the context that I was just editing in.
- aerovistae 6y ago
  I don't. We have chrome dev tools and firefox dev tools which are both literally the same thing as firebug but with a decade of refinement. There are so many great aspects to those tools that firebug didn't have back then because it was the first version basically.
  - yold__ 6y ago
    Seconding that. Although Firebug was wonderful, cross-platform development was not (IE and FireFox). Example of "quirks mode" nonesense: 1. The "hidden" element at the root of the IE DOM tree, only accessible with "*" via CSS 2. inline-block was broken on IE6 (but fixable with hacks), and no transparent PNG support. 3. The outline CS property was implemented the same as background in IE Best of all was the dog slow IE 6 JavaScript interpreter, which was like 50x slower than Firefox and IE 7+.
    - aspnet_dev 6y ago
      Having a proper doc type and having a specific IE stylesheet that added zoom:1 property to element could fix a lot of that off the bat and was a simple one to include on a webpage. Transparent PNGs of course wouldn't work (well there was a way but it was an arcane trick and I can't remember it for the life of me now). TBH I found cross platform development during that time easier than when smart mobile phones came out. There was about 20-30 slightly incompatible forks of the Android Browser/Webkit and the processors were slow and everything was JS. Blackberry OS was still a thing. I also don't miss the problems with iPhone 3GS and 3D background layer flickering. Also programming cross platform at the time showed me how to write lightening fast JS. That has made me a lot of money when people come to me to fix their crap web apps.
      - afavour 6y ago
        > Transparent PNGs of course wouldn't work (well there was a way but it was an arcane trick and I can't remember it for the life of me now). In the recesses of my brain somewhere is a memory that it was related to ActiveX, and/or the CSS filter property. You set some special filter value that invoked ActiveX? Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly but if I think about it too deeply I might start screaming and never stop.
        munchbunny 6y ago
        Yup it was something like that. I think it was the opacity property. IE6 required a custom property so in order to do opacity you had to set at least two CSS properties, might have actually been more because Safari/Firefox/Opera/IE mostly had opacity as a CSS extension. I don’t miss those days.
      - jcoby 6y ago
        > Transparent PNGs of course wouldn't work (well there was a way but it was an arcane trick and I can't remember it for the life of me now). It was a DXImageTransform Alpha filter. Complete pain to use.
        6y ago
- scubbo 6y ago
  What do you miss from Firebug that's missing from the built-in tools in any major browser?
  - wackget 6y ago
    Personally I hate that you can no longer copy an entire URL and its GET/POST data in a single click like you previously could. Now you can "copy URL" or "copy URL parameters" but there's no way to copy them all in one go. You need to manually combine them in an external text editor which is annoying.
    - hvis 6y ago
      "Copy as cURL" or "Copy as Fetch" don't suit your use case?
thow-01187 6y ago
I used to love Firebug, but couldn't help but notice it getting more and more sluggish over the years, with no apparent cause for it. Does anyone know what happened?
- kgc 6y ago
  Firebug was the same speed, but Chrome got faster and websites felt comfortable piling on more JS as a result.
- girishso 6y ago
  For whatever reason Firefox decided to write it's own Dev tool. I remember Firebug developer(s) saying why are you not integrating Firebug itself in Firefox?
sfblah 6y ago
You didn't like debugging with window.alert()?
- crimper 6y ago
  this gave me a vivid image of young me flailing around in the dark trying to understand why undefined is not a function
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    [object Object]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - laurent92 6y ago
    The worst was when I discovered all console.log() crashed because IE6 left “console” as undefined until the developer tools were open. Fortunately another bad feature of IE was to alert() the errors, so customers were aware of each of them and could easily send us the bug back... This bank employee used PrintScreen to print the screenshot on paper. He the successfully faxed it to his email, zipped it and uploaded it to our bugtracker. I had the zip of a .tiff of a scan of a printed screen. I still wonder whether he did it because he was upset, or whether it was a usual workflow.
    - crimper 6y ago
      probably a temporary ad hoc process that is now permanently etched into their brain
- sdesalas 6y ago
  I remember filling js files with alert messages back in 2004. Imagine the joy debugging a 15k line js codebase back then.
- prepend 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> Debugging JS in IE6 Visual Studio (even back when it was called Visual Interdev) supported first-class script debugging with Internet Explorer going as far back as Internet Explorer 4. Ditto cscript/wscript. It just wasn't popular (and few people knew about it) because most people doing front-end web-work _back then_ weren't using Visual Studio, and in general most people weren't doing back-end web-work in Visual Studio either because (pre-ASP.NET MVC), ASP.NET WebForms is, was, and ever-shall-be, godawful.
- bastawhiz 6y ago
  This didn't really help with the DOM or CSS, though. The developer toolbar that worked with IE6 was sorely lacking.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    I think you could explore the DOM tree in the Document Outline window of VS and see node properties in the Properties window, but that could be a false-memory of mine - it's also completely undiscoverable, even today. Support for CSS "debugging" was completely absent, yes.
- diegof79 6y ago
  I used Visual Interdev, but the debugger experience was bad: it was slow to start, and many times it didn’t worked (when it worked it was fine). I’ll add that to the other valid reasons that you mention.
- aspnet_dev 6y ago
  WebForms is still one of the quickest things to actually build intranet applications with and it still does it incredibly well. If I wanted to have a editable table (datagrid) control it literally took about 20 minutes and I had something working and people could use it. The problem with it (much like Angular which btw is basically webforms for JavaScript) is that it required you learning how the event lifecycle worked properly. Whereas other things at the time were web scripts and you could just hack against. It of course had a lot of problems (like everything on the web at the time) but for what it was actually intended for, it was actually really good.
jcheng 6y ago
Whatever happened to Joe Hewitt (one of my developer heroes back in the day)? Did he retire after Facebook?
- x0x0 6y ago
  He grows fruit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyALl2EILQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyALl2EILQk
mattmanser 6y ago
Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar, and IEDevToolbar was superior to Firebug for years for debugging JavaScript. So not a very good example at all, in fact quite the opposite, it just happened to ride the back of the anti-M$ wave and wasn't at all innovative, copying its features from already existing products. Conversely, though it was free, IEDevToolbar was only really advertised to MSDN subscribers, so never got much penetration, especially as by then everyone hated IE6 and a lot of Devs worked in Firefox first. But my company only supported IE6, and when we finally started supporting Firefox, firebug was an annoyingly sub-par experience when debugging js. Even Chrome's early Dev tools had some sorely missed features when it first came out, as far as I can remember it took them years to support being able to just hold your mouse over a variable and see its value. And because it was a web-page about a web-page you got all these weird bugs. And the CSS editor was (and still is) super annoying with its attempts to cut up your text. On top of that visual studio also had a JavaScript debugger, I'm sure there were plenty more paid tools you simply didn't know about.
- endymi0n 6y ago
  That feels a bit like advocating that it was mainly Betamax which changed consumer habits in the 90s since it was technically superior to VHS. It may very well have been the case for a small number of MS centric devs, but for the large majority of users, it was Firebug that really changed the game for the bulk of Frontend devs back then.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  Do you realize that Firebug was the successor to the Venkman debugger and the original DOM Inspector for Mozilla/Netscape? <https://web.archive.org/web/20051223164847/https://www.mozilla.org/js/jsd/jsd_in_js_for_mozilla.html https://web.archive.org/web/20051223164847/https://www.mozil...> <https://web.archive.org/web/20050206082145/http://www.mozilla.org/js/jsd/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050206082145/http://www.mozill...> <https://web.archive.org/web/20050206185242/http://www.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050206185242/http://www.mozill...> (Joe Hewitt created DOM Inspector and checked it in to CVS while working at Netscape. Robert Ginda had separately created Venkman. Firebug used the XPCOM interfaces that had been created to allow for Venkman's debugging capabilities, but IMO was always inferior to the much more powerful Venkman, even if Firebug was slightly prettier to look at. PS: shame on Mozilla for breaking those links. Do you even know how to Web?) > Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar I'm not sure that even if you focus purely on Firebug and ignore DOM Inspector and Venkman that this is even true. Do you have a source for that?
tolmasky 6y ago
It's interesting that this is kind of a constant .1x * 10x = 1 cycle we repeatedly go through with new platforms. We rarely realize the cost of a new development platform in the fact that we often have to start from zero with documentation, tools, communities, etc. Tools are arguably the easiest to realize on day 1, when all of a sudden you can't set a breakpoint. So it's really .1x development in many ways until someone reimplements these standard utilities to "10x" us back to 1.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Some day, before I die, I hope that when I say "If it doesn't work for the developers, then soon it won't work for the customers," and people will know what the hell I'm talking about.
  - codetrotter 6y ago
    I know what you mean. But I am a software developer so I dunno if that counts, or if you meant that non-developer people would know.
  - giovannibonetti 6y ago
    That's why Windows Phone didn't go far, right? Developers were spending so much time on iOS and Android that few companies were willing to spend time on another platform.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      Microsoft historically did okay with DevEx issues. Urns out Microsoft doesn’t make money off of too many things. A lot of their software ends up being loss leaders to support Office and Windows sales. I use my tablet occasionally for Numbers, but it never even occurs to me to try it on my phone.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Shorel 6y ago
guidoism 6y ago
This. I worked at Amazon during this time on our custom web server and before that I had been using telnet to hand type my commands or various perl scripts I wrote to emulate a browser's requests. And... ugh, tcpdump to figure out what exactly browsers were sending before they got to apache. Firebug was like magic!
BrissyCoder 6y ago
> Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Have been a professional developer since 1999 - no idead what you're talking about.
yread 6y ago
Debugging safari on ipad issues without a mac is still like that. ilibmobiledevice stops working all the time
gfxgirl 6y ago
As someone that was used to Visual Studio's Debugger, that Firefox had one was an (oh, they finally caught up to 1995) To be clear I mean that Visual Studio had a C/C++ debugger but outside of that most languages that I used in any other situation were missing good debuggers.
ryan-allen 6y ago
Prior to Firebug, when I was unfortunately writing ActionScript in Flash, there was Charles [0]. It's still really good! [0] https://www.charlesproxy.com/ https://www.charlesproxy.com/

zachruss92 6y ago

I miss Firebug. Simpler times...

Minor49er 6y ago
Same here. I miss when I could inspect network headers from the console without having to go over to the Network tab. Updating HTML in realtime without committing to an edit was also really handy since I wouldn't lose the context that I was just editing in.
aerovistae 6y ago
I don't. We have chrome dev tools and firefox dev tools which are both literally the same thing as firebug but with a decade of refinement. There are so many great aspects to those tools that firebug didn't have back then because it was the first version basically.
- yold__ 6y ago
  Seconding that. Although Firebug was wonderful, cross-platform development was not (IE and FireFox). Example of "quirks mode" nonesense: 1. The "hidden" element at the root of the IE DOM tree, only accessible with "*" via CSS 2. inline-block was broken on IE6 (but fixable with hacks), and no transparent PNG support. 3. The outline CS property was implemented the same as background in IE Best of all was the dog slow IE 6 JavaScript interpreter, which was like 50x slower than Firefox and IE 7+.
  - aspnet_dev 6y ago
    Having a proper doc type and having a specific IE stylesheet that added zoom:1 property to element could fix a lot of that off the bat and was a simple one to include on a webpage. Transparent PNGs of course wouldn't work (well there was a way but it was an arcane trick and I can't remember it for the life of me now). TBH I found cross platform development during that time easier than when smart mobile phones came out. There was about 20-30 slightly incompatible forks of the Android Browser/Webkit and the processors were slow and everything was JS. Blackberry OS was still a thing. I also don't miss the problems with iPhone 3GS and 3D background layer flickering. Also programming cross platform at the time showed me how to write lightening fast JS. That has made me a lot of money when people come to me to fix their crap web apps.
    - afavour 6y ago
      > Transparent PNGs of course wouldn't work (well there was a way but it was an arcane trick and I can't remember it for the life of me now). In the recesses of my brain somewhere is a memory that it was related to ActiveX, and/or the CSS filter property. You set some special filter value that invoked ActiveX? Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly but if I think about it too deeply I might start screaming and never stop.
      - munchbunny 6y ago
        Yup it was something like that. I think it was the opacity property. IE6 required a custom property so in order to do opacity you had to set at least two CSS properties, might have actually been more because Safari/Firefox/Opera/IE mostly had opacity as a CSS extension. I don’t miss those days.
    - jcoby 6y ago
      > Transparent PNGs of course wouldn't work (well there was a way but it was an arcane trick and I can't remember it for the life of me now). It was a DXImageTransform Alpha filter. Complete pain to use.
      - 6y ago
scubbo 6y ago
What do you miss from Firebug that's missing from the built-in tools in any major browser?
- wackget 6y ago
  Personally I hate that you can no longer copy an entire URL and its GET/POST data in a single click like you previously could. Now you can "copy URL" or "copy URL parameters" but there's no way to copy them all in one go. You need to manually combine them in an external text editor which is annoying.
  - hvis 6y ago
    "Copy as cURL" or "Copy as Fetch" don't suit your use case?

thow-01187 6y ago

I used to love Firebug, but couldn't help but notice it getting more and more sluggish over the years, with no apparent cause for it. Does anyone know what happened?

kgc 6y ago
Firebug was the same speed, but Chrome got faster and websites felt comfortable piling on more JS as a result.
girishso 6y ago
For whatever reason Firefox decided to write it's own Dev tool. I remember Firebug developer(s) saying why are you not integrating Firebug itself in Firefox?

sfblah 6y ago

You didn't like debugging with window.alert()?

crimper 6y ago
this gave me a vivid image of young me flailing around in the dark trying to understand why undefined is not a function
- nicoburns 6y ago
  [object Object]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- laurent92 6y ago
  The worst was when I discovered all console.log() crashed because IE6 left “console” as undefined until the developer tools were open. Fortunately another bad feature of IE was to alert() the errors, so customers were aware of each of them and could easily send us the bug back... This bank employee used PrintScreen to print the screenshot on paper. He the successfully faxed it to his email, zipped it and uploaded it to our bugtracker. I had the zip of a .tiff of a scan of a printed screen. I still wonder whether he did it because he was upset, or whether it was a usual workflow.
  - crimper 6y ago
    probably a temporary ad hoc process that is now permanently etched into their brain
sdesalas 6y ago
I remember filling js files with alert messages back in 2004. Imagine the joy debugging a 15k line js codebase back then.
prepend 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago

> Debugging JS in IE6 Visual Studio (even back when it was called Visual Interdev) supported first-class script debugging with Internet Explorer going as far back as Internet Explorer 4. Ditto cscript/wscript. It just wasn't popular (and few people knew about it) because most people doing front-end web-work _back then_ weren't using Visual Studio, and in general most people weren't doing back-end web-work in Visual Studio either because (pre-ASP.NET MVC), ASP.NET WebForms is, was, and ever-shall-be, godawful.

bastawhiz 6y ago
This didn't really help with the DOM or CSS, though. The developer toolbar that worked with IE6 was sorely lacking.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  I think you could explore the DOM tree in the Document Outline window of VS and see node properties in the Properties window, but that could be a false-memory of mine - it's also completely undiscoverable, even today. Support for CSS "debugging" was completely absent, yes.
diegof79 6y ago
I used Visual Interdev, but the debugger experience was bad: it was slow to start, and many times it didn’t worked (when it worked it was fine). I’ll add that to the other valid reasons that you mention.
aspnet_dev 6y ago
WebForms is still one of the quickest things to actually build intranet applications with and it still does it incredibly well. If I wanted to have a editable table (datagrid) control it literally took about 20 minutes and I had something working and people could use it. The problem with it (much like Angular which btw is basically webforms for JavaScript) is that it required you learning how the event lifecycle worked properly. Whereas other things at the time were web scripts and you could just hack against. It of course had a lot of problems (like everything on the web at the time) but for what it was actually intended for, it was actually really good.

jcheng 6y ago

Whatever happened to Joe Hewitt (one of my developer heroes back in the day)? Did he retire after Facebook?

x0x0 6y ago
He grows fruit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyALl2EILQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyALl2EILQk

mattmanser 6y ago

Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar, and IEDevToolbar was superior to Firebug for years for debugging JavaScript. So not a very good example at all, in fact quite the opposite, it just happened to ride the back of the anti-M$ wave and wasn't at all innovative, copying its features from already existing products. Conversely, though it was free, IEDevToolbar was only really advertised to MSDN subscribers, so never got much penetration, especially as by then everyone hated IE6 and a lot of Devs worked in Firefox first. But my company only supported IE6, and when we finally started supporting Firefox, firebug was an annoyingly sub-par experience when debugging js. Even Chrome's early Dev tools had some sorely missed features when it first came out, as far as I can remember it took them years to support being able to just hold your mouse over a variable and see its value. And because it was a web-page about a web-page you got all these weird bugs. And the CSS editor was (and still is) super annoying with its attempts to cut up your text. On top of that visual studio also had a JavaScript debugger, I'm sure there were plenty more paid tools you simply didn't know about.

endymi0n 6y ago
That feels a bit like advocating that it was mainly Betamax which changed consumer habits in the 90s since it was technically superior to VHS. It may very well have been the case for a small number of MS centric devs, but for the large majority of users, it was Firebug that really changed the game for the bulk of Frontend devs back then.
pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
Do you realize that Firebug was the successor to the Venkman debugger and the original DOM Inspector for Mozilla/Netscape? <https://web.archive.org/web/20051223164847/https://www.mozilla.org/js/jsd/jsd_in_js_for_mozilla.html https://web.archive.org/web/20051223164847/https://www.mozil...> <https://web.archive.org/web/20050206082145/http://www.mozilla.org/js/jsd/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050206082145/http://www.mozill...> <https://web.archive.org/web/20050206185242/http://www.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050206185242/http://www.mozill...> (Joe Hewitt created DOM Inspector and checked it in to CVS while working at Netscape. Robert Ginda had separately created Venkman. Firebug used the XPCOM interfaces that had been created to allow for Venkman's debugging capabilities, but IMO was always inferior to the much more powerful Venkman, even if Firebug was slightly prettier to look at. PS: shame on Mozilla for breaking those links. Do you even know how to Web?) > Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar I'm not sure that even if you focus purely on Firebug and ignore DOM Inspector and Venkman that this is even true. Do you have a source for that?

tolmasky 6y ago

It's interesting that this is kind of a constant .1x * 10x = 1 cycle we repeatedly go through with new platforms. We rarely realize the cost of a new development platform in the fact that we often have to start from zero with documentation, tools, communities, etc. Tools are arguably the easiest to realize on day 1, when all of a sudden you can't set a breakpoint. So it's really .1x development in many ways until someone reimplements these standard utilities to "10x" us back to 1.

hinkley 6y ago
Some day, before I die, I hope that when I say "If it doesn't work for the developers, then soon it won't work for the customers," and people will know what the hell I'm talking about.
- codetrotter 6y ago
  I know what you mean. But I am a software developer so I dunno if that counts, or if you meant that non-developer people would know.
- giovannibonetti 6y ago
  That's why Windows Phone didn't go far, right? Developers were spending so much time on iOS and Android that few companies were willing to spend time on another platform.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Microsoft historically did okay with DevEx issues. Urns out Microsoft doesn’t make money off of too many things. A lot of their software ends up being loss leaders to support Office and Windows sales. I use my tablet occasionally for Numbers, but it never even occurs to me to try it on my phone.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Shorel 6y ago

guidoism 6y ago

This. I worked at Amazon during this time on our custom web server and before that I had been using telnet to hand type my commands or various perl scripts I wrote to emulate a browser's requests. And... ugh, tcpdump to figure out what exactly browsers were sending before they got to apache. Firebug was like magic!

BrissyCoder 6y ago

> Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Have been a professional developer since 1999 - no idead what you're talking about.

yread 6y ago

Debugging safari on ipad issues without a mac is still like that. ilibmobiledevice stops working all the time

gfxgirl 6y ago

As someone that was used to Visual Studio's Debugger, that Firefox had one was an (oh, they finally caught up to 1995) To be clear I mean that Visual Studio had a C/C++ debugger but outside of that most languages that I used in any other situation were missing good debuggers.

ryan-allen 6y ago

Prior to Firebug, when I was unfortunately writing ActionScript in Flash, there was Charles [0]. It's still really good! [0] https://www.charlesproxy.com/ https://www.charlesproxy.com/