February
1st,
2006
I’d like to start this post by saying that I really didn’t expect there to be so many JavaScript related posts on this site, but it’s just the area that I’ve spent more time developing in and finding interesting things to share about lately.
With that said I found this excellent Firefox extension called FireBug by Joe Hewitt last week, which is an excellent replacement to the default Firefox JavaScript console.
FireBug has the following features:
- Adds a console to the bottom of every page in Firefox, displaying errors that occurred for that page alone.
- Inspect DOM elements by clicking on them, which gives you most of what you’d find in the DOM inspector in a quicker, easier and nicer manner.
- Log objects from your web page scripts, this is like bringing the Firefox console into your everyday JavaScript console. There are also plans to make this feature available in other browsers in a similar manner to my JSDebug script.
- Logging of XMLHttpRequests where you can inspect the response text or XML among other things. I used to use a Greasemonkey script to do this, but that stopped working a few versions of Greasemonkey ago, either way FireBug handles this a easier, cleaner and quicker.
- Error status bar indicator, similar to the one in Web Developer Extension by Chris Pederick, which shows the number of errors in a page. Clicking this will launch the FireBug console to give you all the details of the errors.
- Error filtering, which allows you to hide all those annoying CSS or chrome errors that have appeared in the default console since Firefox 1.5
Which I think you’ll agree is quite a lot and the fact that they all work pretty much perfectly, in such an early alpha release it is a testament to Joe’s work, go get FireBug now.