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After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills 'Firebug' Dev Tool (infoworld.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the squashing-a-bug dept.

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.

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. As usual, Mozilla doesn't care about users by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    And this is typical of open source software. The developers often make decisions against the best interests and needs of their users, removing necessary features and useful functionality while making the software more complicated. As if the WebExtensions debacle wasn't bad enough, Firefox 57 is shaping up to be the downfall of Firefox. Sure, Firefox 56 might be faster than its predecessors, but market share will continue to evaporate in favor of browsers like Chrome. Face it, Firefox is basically dead, and the developers killed it. Perhaps if open source developers learned from these mistakes, fewer open source projects would fail in this predictable and frequent manner.

    1. Re:As usual, Mozilla doesn't care about users by TheSunborn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Some features have been merged in. But firebug is still far better then what is build in to firefox. So no more firefox upgrades for me -(

    2. Re:As usual, Mozilla doesn't care about users by theendlessnow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Firebug is better than Firefox Developer Tools. Those that have tried to use both will tell you. Now, if Firefox Developer Tools is set to improve.. I'm fine with that.

  2. Re: Firefox is dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think that is because of mobile, Android devices are way more popular than Apple and a small amount of people actually change the predefined browser or the predefined applications, also I think that all Apple users don't like to personalize anything, they don't like to play with settings and are less likely to change the predefined applications, they just use the device without worrying about anything else.

    I do use Firefox for everything and Chrome for GMail and GoogleDocs since both have different JavaScript engines suited for different websites, sometimes Chrome behaves good and sometimes it goes really bad, the same goes for Firefox.

    I had some users complaining with MAC-OSX Safari because it didn't show some financial websites and for them I end installing Chrome and Firefox for them.

    The web is supposed to be fragmented and that's good, We've 4 major browsers that have their user base, web designers need to be more careful with what they do, think a little bit less in the looks and a bit more in the use.