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FireBug Still Blazing

DOM-Hungry Bug

Despite the recent announcement that John J. Barton is leaving the FireBug team,the little bug that could is still owning the DOM.

I've been on a short hiatus from web development. Spending a lot of time upgrading some .Net applications and super charging aging MS SQL entities.

This was a blessing really. While the latest FireFox upgrade schedule is a vast improvement in terms of stability and features, it also meant the FireBug addon kept breaking!

Issues like this are what make developers switch in my opinion.

Google Chrome has decent built in debugging tools but not enough to make me change over from FireFox as my main development browser. You know what it's like when you get used to a tool that works. Changing without major improvements is just time you could be spending developing awesome apps.

Back to the point. Despite Barton's departure, I was really happy to find a new release of FireBug when I found myself needing to tweak some CSS this week. FireBug 1.8 is compatible with:

• Firefox 5.0
• Firefox 6.0
• Firefox 7.0 (Aurora)
• Firefox 8.0 (Nightly)

Also, belaying my initial fears, the rest of the FireBug team seems committed to maintaining the code base with the additional help of the FireFox developer tools team. We can only hope that they can keep up with the aggressive new release schedule FireFox announced. Time will tell which browser will reign for development but for now at least I'm staying foxy.

If you are on FireFox and you haven't tried FireBug, it will change your life, or at the least your dev style.

Are you already a FireBug fan? Will you stick with FireFox for dev? Or do you have an alternative that can finally break my dependence on this cycle of catch-up and release?