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After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills 'Firebug' Dev Tool (infoworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:
The Firebug web development tool, an open source add-on to the Firefox browser, is being discontinued after 12 years, replaced by Firefox Developer Tools. Firebug will be dropped with next month's release of Firefox Quantum (version 57). The Firebug tool lets developers inspect, edit, and debug code in the Firefox browser as well as monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript in webpages. It still has more than a million people using it, said Jan Honza Odvarko, who has been the leader of the Firebug project. Many extensions were built for Firebug, which is itself is an extension to Firefox... The goal is to make debugging native to Firefox. "Sometimes, it's better to start from scratch, which is especially true for software development," Odvarko said.
Perhaps if open source developers learned from these mistakes
What mistakes? Firebug has been merged into Firefox Developer Tools. This happened a long time ago.
Unfortunately, Firefox is getting neutered with the release of version 57.
You don't have to give up add-ons just because Firefox is. I've been using Waterfox for years. It uses the current Firefox code but doesn't disable add-ons and it strips out all the tracking Mozilla puts in. The guy who maintains it started it as a 64 bit version of Firefox before Mozilla released one. I liked it so much I never switched back even when Mozilla released a 64 bit Firefox. He recently released an Android port and I even replaced Chrome on my device with it.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Firefox remains the dominant browser
Bullcrap. Chrome has about half the market. Firefox is at about 6%, about half of Safari's share.
I only use Firefox for Selenium scripts, and even for that I have to use an old version since the latest releases of FF no longer work with Selenium. Web automation was the only area where Firefox was superior ... so they broke it.
A much better option is to go with Firefox ESR, currently at version 52.4.1. I've installed it everywhere on all my Windows and Linux machines - it's guaranteed to be stable and supported until June 2018, which hopefully will be enough time for the new Firefox to stabilize (or worst-case scenario, give me enough time to find an alternative).
One warning though - it may be difficult to move your Firefox profile from 56 to 52, as from 54 onward Mozilla messed up some backwards compatibility in preparation for 57.
This is not even remotely true, and former Mozilla execs know it:
https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/
Uh, no. see the tracking bug here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=991806
There are numerous parts of FB that are not in the FDT. A couple seem fairly basic (such as auto-completion) and FB as said for awhile that they won't do WebExtensions, so it sort of boggles my mind that they are not at parity yet.
Holy shifting goal posts, Batman! First you claim that FB doesn't matter because it was nothing but a skin to the underlying tools, which was shown to be wrong. Now it apparently doesn't matter because it was discontinued years ago. Good to know that being the 15th most popular extension, which people can still download today, without a complete replacement doesn't matter because of lack of development. You know, despite the fact that WebExtensions was coming long before along with the known inability to duplicate some features on the platform.
Guess we know what sort of thinking underlies the push for WebExt.
Remember Firefox was growing almost unstoppable in 2010 and within 2 years started declining FAST. Any piece of software it can happen too as we all remember the days of 90% marketshare of IE 6 too which started to wane in just a few years to Firefox previously.
A major difference: Internet Explorer was intentionally ignored and crippled by Microsoft to stall the development of web apps in favor of native apps. Firefox won because they pretty much got a walkover and everyone except Microsoft wanted it to win. Nobody at Mozilla wanted to lose users and few wanted a for-profit company to replace them but they lost anyway. IMHO because they took way, way, way too long to do multi-process. Close a Chrome tab and the resources get reclaimed. If it crashes, one tab crashes. In Firefox it all came crumbling down and you had to kill it completely. They lost to Chrome on merit and the sooner they get their head out of their ass and stop blaming other things the better. Yeah I saw the ads for Chrome too, but I wouldn't have switched unless it actually sucked less.
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