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Debugging CSS, AJAX and DOM with Firebug
prostoalex writes "Joe Hewitt of Parakey in the latest Dr. Dobb's Journal provides a detailed overview of the Firebug extension for Firefox: 'Firebug breaks the page down into a set of tabs that depict its most important aspects — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the DOM, network activity, and a console for errors and log messages. No tab is an island; Firebug lets you browse code just as you browse the Web by presenting objects as hyperlinks that can take you from one view to another.'"
Please allow me to kiss your feet. ;)
But seriously, Firebug (and the webdev extension) have made my job a LOT easier. (And my co-workers, too.) Problems that took me 30 minutes to an hour in the past to find, I can now find them in seconds. It's been a god-send. Thank you so much.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Rarely a day goes by when I don't find some use for Firebug, but I concur with the sentiment that the Web Developer's Toolbar is often needed to create a powerhouse set of dev tools for the Web. If all you have are these two, you're a head and shoulders ahead of the game.
Not everyone has the option of integrating a whole ajax toolkit into their work. Anyway, ajax is far from the only thing that firebug is useful for. The error reporting makes it a lot easier to track down and repair general javascript problems than with the existing console.
What difference does it make what your browser of choice is? You're developing, not browsing.