Christopher Bennage

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Get Firebug

If you are a Web developer, and you are not using Firebug, stop what you are doing and go install it immediately.

I first heard about Firebug on Rick Strahl's blog a couple of months ago, but in the flurry of work I promptly forgot it. A couple of days ago a friend was listing the reasons that why Firefox pwns IE and Firebug was the first.

Firebug is an add-on for Firefox. It allows you to inspect the details of the currently loaded page. You can visually inspect the DOM, execute JavaScript snippets on the fly, and more. I'm thoroughly impressed.

My feature du jour is the way it displays the CSS box model for the currently selected element.

Firebug Screenshot

I'm not going to repeat the list of features here, you can get that from the Firebug page. If you have not tried it, go check it out.

Published Mar 06 2007, 05:23 PM by Christopher Bennage

Filed under: web, dom, javascript, css

Comments

Michal Grzegorzewski said:

It's cool! In IE world I use the IE Dev Toolbar by MS, which has also very rich functionality.

# March 7, 2007 4:24 AM

DaRage said:

Whoever did it is a genius. It's very well done. I can't live without it now. I mostly use the css editing where you can find what are the styles that apply to an element and edit them on the fly. amazaing and free!!!

# March 7, 2007 6:49 AM

Wayne said:

I have found the network monitoring and javascript debugging invaluable in working with AJAX. Being able to see exactly what's sent and received by your web services, along with the time it took for a response has made finding bugs a whole lot easier.

# March 7, 2007 10:33 AM

N51 said:

Agreed, Firebug is an excellent development tool.

# March 7, 2007 5:50 PM

Kevin said:

Har, I was going to tell you that you could quote me if you wanted to. Some of my word choices may not have been the pr0f35510n@1, but the point remains: Firebug saved my life, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

# March 7, 2007 6:09 PM

Joe Niland said:

Thanks Chris! Awesome tool!!

# March 19, 2007 4:58 PM

About Christopher Bennage

Christopher is a software developer and consultant at Blue Spire Consulting, a company he co-founded with Rob Eisenberg in 2006. He is a Christian, a marginal musician, and an armchair philosopher. His interests include programming, liberal education, science, truth, beauty, and a number of deceased British authors (C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and most recently Owen Barfield.) He lives in Tallahassee, FL with his wife and three children and still prefers to play as the Night Elves in WarCraft 3.