Back in the days when I was a kid, it was nothing out of ordinary to stare with my friends at some firebugs for hours. While the firebug, or “Pyrrhocoris apterus,” for the scientists, is one ubiquitous insect that eats seeds from lime trees and mallows, there’s also one firebug that’s eating code for breakfast… and the same goes for his other meals! 😉
Firebug allows developers to forget about having to use a bunch of different tools for fine tuning and troubleshooting their code. With this Firefox plugin, you can easily edit, debug, and watch your CSS, HTML and JavaScript code without breaking a sweat!
Various features allow you to monitor network activity, so you can easily find which one of your pages is taking too long to load, explore DOM objects, use the command line to quickly run JavaScript code, as well as accurately log all debug info you need to find the problems hidden deep inside your code.
Oh, yeah, something you also need to know if Firebug sounds like something new – while you can run it in a window of its own, as you can see in my screenshot above, Firebug can also appear as a bar located at the bottom of your browser, so it won’t ever get in your way. Is this sweet, or what? 🙂
Compatibility: Firebug 1.3 only works with Firefox, while the adventurous ones using Firefox 3.5 Beta should use Firebug 1.4 Beta, but if you want Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari support, you should try Firebug Lite
