As many well know, I am a huge advocate for Firefox. As a user, I like it for a few reasons; its consistent across platforms, tabbed browsing, fairly secure, skinable, and last but not least…extensibile.
The extensibility of the god of browsers is where things really shine for me as a developer…a web application developer. There are two that I use religiously for Javascript debugging, DOM inspecting, CSS tweaking, source viewing, Ajax calls, etc. Here they are. Get them. Use them. You’ll crap your pants.
Web Developer – get it here.
The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Firebug – get it here.
FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.
Other fun features:
* XMLHttpRequest Spy – Ever wonder what all them newfangled Ajax websites are up to? Watch the requests fly by in the console!
* One web page, one console – Tired of slogging through a zillion errors in the JavaScript Console trying to find the one you want? The FireBug console is built into the bottom of the browser, and only shows you errors and log messages that came from the page you’re looking at.
* JavaScript Error Status Bar Indicator – It’s a sin that Firefox doesn’t include this by default, like IE does. When there is an error in the page, the status bar will let you know with a big red blob.
* Logging for web pages – Sick and tired of “alert debugging”? Jealous of all your C programmer buddies with their fancy printf? Now you can log text and objects to the FireBug console from any web page. See my website for more info on this.
[etc]
And obviously…if you don’t have FireFox (tsk tsk), get it here:
Yes, Firebug is much better than Vankman (JS debugger).
my firefox keeps saying update failed and you have to say ok and then it starts help
I think that as well as a JavaScript error status indicator, all modern browsers should also display an XHTML/HTML error status indicator (i.e. where the page claims to be XHTML/HTML but contains errors).
I can’t really say that the “blob” that firebug gives is all that big.
I think it’s a blatant omission that this tool has no option to display a POPUP when a Javascript error occurs. Like it is now, they’re most easily missed. IE has that even built-in.