“For many users of Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser, Firefox is simply a tool for looking at Web content. For others, Firefox is an enabling tool to actually help develop content and code for the Web. This week, Mozilla released the results of a developer survey it conducted in November 2009. The survey received responses from 5054 developers spread across 119 countries and provides some insights into how developers work with Firefox – and what about Firefox makes it so critical as a tool for developing.”
I simply cannot imagine developing without Firebug. The funny thing is I was introduced to Firebug by my non technical boss who was using it to test page load speeds. But the inspect element feature is obviously its best feature. Much more advanced than Chrome’s and easier to manipulate than IE 8’s developer tools.
Definitely. Its Javascript debugging features and console are life-savers, too – and the ‘net’ view can come in really handy if you do AJAX-style things.
I’m sad you didn’t mention Opera, whose Opera Dragonfly is a very capable counterpart to FireBug.
I’m a long time Opera user and I just don’t get why people are so all over Firefox. I even laughed when in last H.264/Theora OSAlert article, someone explained how Firefox took market shares from IE with its load of features, including tabs… But my intent is not to start another best browser contest.
Back to the dev thing, the only thing I can rant about in DragonFly is that when a expanded variable views got collapsed each debug step. That was the last time Firebug didn’t allow me to do something and thank god, Opera was there.
Honestly, Firebug is the best thing that ever happened in the web dev scene, at least for making Javacript debugging so easy. And I don’t even mention the Net or Console tabs.
But I am so pissed off that Firefox needs a live connection just to reach ‘localhost:8080’! At my workplace, losing the wifi connection several times a day isn’t rare. When that happens and I’m using Firefox, I can’t reach my local pages anymore. I don’t see any logical reason for that, although a reason probably exists. Am I the only one experiencing that live connection need from Firefox?
The Opera debugger was actually the first time I saw this stuff in a browser, I remember thinking how cool it was. But at the time it was really slow. I remember you had to wait like a whole minute just for it to load up the developer window. I’m sure things are better now but at the time it was not usable.
Some Mozilla developers have converted to Solaris, just to get DTrace.
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2007/09/06/land-of-dtrace/
That’s a pretty old post. Nowadays in Linux, there is both systemtap and dynamic ftrace which works really well.
http://lwn.net/Articles/343766/
Edited 2010-03-28 20:51 UTC
I’m not a professional web developer, so I gotta ask. What makes Firefox a superior dev environment to other browsers? For my pet projects I usually use Opera Dragonfly, since Opera is my main browser, and I have found it quite nice, without missing any of Firebug’s capabilities. Also, although I haven’t use them at all, Chrome’s dev tools seem to do pretty much the same stuff.
So, have I missed some of firebug’s functionality? Is there some other add on that is crucial for web development? The linked article seems to be shy on the details.
I much prefer Safari with all it’s development tools.