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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.
From constantly failing TLS connections, >2GB of ram for a single blank tab, and constant chugging, it's pointless for Firefox to even try. What other browsers are there than Chrome-based? Chrome still can't stop tabs loading on startup and the download manager is trash.
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.
Firefox marks most of the add-ons I use as "Legacy".
It seems to me that software and hardware organizations are pushing for more and more control.
For Fuck Sake Mozilla, just stop with the bullshit already. You assholes are *killing* this browser!
Seriously, who came up with _that_ name?
It's clear that Firefox 57 is going to remove desired functionality in the extensions it renders unusable. Mozilla really needs to address this problem and allocate resources to providing the necessary functionality. Their best choice is to stop supporting fringe platforms like Linux and task those developers with providing similar functionality to lost extensions either built in to Firefox or through new extensions. Can anyone justify supporting fringe platforms like Linux? The market share is so low that it just isn't worth supporting Linux. Firefox would benefit greatly from making Linux unsupported and refocusing development on providing functionality for Firefox on Windows and MacOS.
I did this on all my Linux boxes:
sudo apt-mark hold firefox firefox-locale-en
Now when I update my system, I won't get the FF57 update. The reason is, about half the extensions I'm using are unavailable in FF57 due to the deprecation of the XUL framework.
Until I sort out what to do (maybe move to a Firefox fork), I'm staying on FF56. Unfortunately most of the alternative browsers like Chrome are much worse from a privacy standpoint. But with FF57, I've heard rumors (not verified, but troubling...) that the former privacy extensions that are being ported to 57 won't be able to offer as much privacy as before. For example, instead of blocking the fetch of various ad trackers, they have to fetch them but then not display them. The fetching is the part I want to block.
So until I find replacements for the non-ported extensions, and until everything resolves itself in some adequate way, I'm not moving to FF57. The apt-mark hold above will help anyone else who is riding the same ship.
The new Firefox dev tools are superior to firebug in every way, which was slow as balls.
Firefox is still the patrician's choice.
Linux's questionable io scheduling modules have been the biggest issue in that regard (as evidenced by bfq(?) becoming an in-kernel scheduler.) But a secondary one is that firefox just leaks, even the latest versions. NoScript/uMatrix/uBlock help, but only until you have to turn javascript on for a website, implying the problem is related to garbage collection with the javascript engine, or cornercases with tab/page state that never get recovered.
Even using about:memory 'minimize memory' button just leads to a few hundred extra megs getting used and then a small, usually 20ish percent drop in memory usage, assuming you closed whole windows worth of tabs (I average about 200-300 tabs spread across 5-8 windows, to keep articles and links in the same window/state for future bookmarking, when I've run down every sublink/article I opened.) Back in the early firefox days, before it switched to XUL and the various javascript changes, I could run that 300+ pages and not use more than 1-1.5GB of RAM. Modern Firefox however uses a lot more per tab, and garbage collects even worse than the old firefox did (however those older versions had their own issues, notably a small leak that would crash the browser after 1-7 days, depending on your usage patterns... Mozilla has always sucked with memory management, both in the past and today.)
Having said all this, SOME of that can be mitigated by periodically killing the Sandbox thread in the post FF52(54?) releases, which is where most of the memory leaks end up. HOWEVER the main firefox thread still has some memory leaks of its own and I have had it end up at ~1gig while requiring 1.5+ gigs in the Sandbox thread. And this is all excluding the fact that the new firefox versions require access to /dev/shm (or its windows equivalent I imagine) which can both cause reduced performance on systems without a large amount of shared memory space, as well as crashes *ALL YOUR TABS INSTANTLY* if shared memory fills up, whether your tabs are currently active or sitting idle.
I don't know what the solution is, but I can tell you Mozilla Foundation/Corp isn't who is going to be blazing the browser paths of the future. Nor is Google with Chrome, given how lazy their development work has become and how the veneer of respectability they have had for many years is starting to chip off.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com...
Whats better than making the same mistake once? Making it twice of course.
"His name was James Damore."
Firebug isn't alive. The proper title is "After 12 years, Mozilla discontinues 'Firebug' dev tool".
#DeleteFacebook
for all intensive purposes.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
https://sourceforge.net/projec...
Simply use old version. Nothing new is so fantastic anyway. Firefox 44 is cool tbh.
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.
With Mozilla literally donating money to a terrorist organization (google it yourself) I have no desire to support them ever again.
I knew I could no longer trust Mozilla when they sold out to George Soros:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2017-08-14-firefox-browsers-will-soon-block-fake-news-flagged-by-george-soros-linked-left-wing-groups.html
I have used Firefox for over a decade. I have been loyal. Mozilla is selling us out to globalists. The Mozilla Foundation needs a wholesale purge of top management and new leaders installed who will focus on what once made it a great organization. I have no interest in folllwing New Mozilla down the path of Marxist politics.
Brave Browser is where the future is.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com...
I am working on a case where I'm heavily modifying a charting library to fit my particular use case. In hindsight, I should have just started from scratch. Here is why that would have been the correct decision. The charting library I started with had a crap ton of features. Everything was written to an interface, with most classes having four or five levels of inheritance and this massive ipc mess kicking around a custom property handler to update threads in the system.
The thing is, I needed a fairly narrow subset of that, with a bunch of interface breaking changes left and right. I ended up deleting like half of it to get it out of my way, and there are now fewer levels of inheritance, since I needed the different parts to work together more closely to get decent performance. The biggest thing I could have reused would be the idea of using a force based layout algorithm, but even then I could have recreated it fairly fast and had something more maintainable in the end if I started from scratch.
Of course I originally thought I'd just do small changes and move on with life. Sadly that didn't work out. I even half planned to try to get my company to let me export the changes to the parent project. That didn't work out either, as my changes are too invasive for the parent project to want them.
Basically it seems you can get by with writing it from scratch if the work to do so is on the same order as making anything else do the task, particularly if you can't ship those improvements off to that project for someone else to help maintain. Of course, I still think we perhaps start over too quickly, but I gave this a fair shot and I'm still not starting over since it is too late for that solution not to take longer.
Ironically, had I started from scratch I wouldn't have learned some architectural ideas I might have needed to do a clean rewrite of the small bit I needed. I could have still done it, since I could have figured them out.
Maybe in the end the biggest warning about starting over is to ask yourself if you understand why things are how they are. The reasons may be good or bad, but if you don't understand the current design to some extent you risk making a worse design.
Downvoting is not and has never been equivalent to censorship. Your post is right there, unredacted. I read it. Surfing at -1 is as long a tradition here as trolling. What you object to is that people have exercised their free speech and labeled you a stupid asshole.
Supporting Linux is not some huge ordeal, and probably at this point it's mostly a sunk cost. Also, the Ubuntu software survey had Firefox as the overwhelming choice of Linux users. Linux marketshare is (shockingly) in the 3-5% range, and Firefox is 5-6% marketshare. You do the math there, buckwheat. Subsequently, fuck off: there's nothing more boring than a whiny troll.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Most of the major Extensions have a version compatible with FF 57, there are a few holdouts still, but everything should settle down shortly. The biggest surprise for me is that Session Manager appears to of done nothing towards the WebApi compatibility due to a handful of missing/incomplete API's that would impact a small portion of it's features. "Tab Session Manager," is a bit buggy atm and pretty barebones but functional enough for now.
Fortunately I was able to delete the current firefox and install a previous version.
Meh, I've read that piece before and it's right except whenever it's wrong. I've ripped out smaller and bigger pieces of software and completely rewritten it from scratch, the problem is that you got people jumping the gun just like those who want to switch to fad language or framework or technology of the day. The people who clearly don't understand the complexity of the software but conclude that because I can't untangle this tangled mess it should be rewritten are dangerous as fuck. Then you have the people that have fought the code, mapped out the maze and when they say it can be done much cleaner and simpler, please listen. A lot of code is just bad, like structurally it's convoluted. Very often it's the result of the code being expanded or twisted into serving unexpected use cases that weren't in the original plan. It's often when you've lived with the system a while you understand the true requirements.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In this case, Joel on software is right. I've used firebug for a long time and it's much better than the browser tools in Chrome or IE. Firefox will not improve the developer experience by reinventing firebug, they will just make it different and repeat mistakes.
lucm, indeed.
I stuck with FF through all the terrible updates for one reason and one reason only: Firebug
It was the most powerful development tool a web developer had. Easy to navigate, great debugger, smooth css editing, told you exactly what the problem was. The day it stopped worked I dumped FF and never looked back.
Chrome dev tools are acceptable but just hard to navigate and find things. Have made strides in capturing events.
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
Firefox is an excellent example of why that view lacks nuance. The Netscape code base had become bloated and unmanageable, so we got Firefox. Continuous re-factoring is essential to progress.
1 out of 6 of my extensions are OK to go for FF57. Some of them that aren't have issued statements saying that it's impossible to work with WebExtensions so they have no possibility to go forward. I basically have no choice but to stay with FF56 until they see the light and add back support for real extensions.
Morphing Software
Most of the major Extensions have a version compatible with FF 57, there are a few holdouts still
Some of the WebExtension replacements for legacy extensions that I use are waiting for Mozilla to make equivalent functionality available. For example, I use Keybinder to disable the Ctrl+Q shortcut that I sometimes press by accident when aiming for Ctrl+W or Ctrl+Tab. The developers of equivalent WebExtensions are waiting on a fix for bug 1325692, which a Mozilla engineer has marked as wontfix for Firefox 57.
Loss of Ctrl+Q blocking causes data loss.
I get the very strong feeling that this "improvement" may well be used to make it more difficult to, say, remove parts of web pages or disable aspects that users find problematic, such as the setting that keeps you from being able to copy and paste text. In other words, continuing to take overall control from the user and give it to the web platform.
Its just a clever way to be able to limit and hide what they don't want you to see.
I tried migrating to dev tools but as I said somewhere above it was horribly slow and substantially impacted productivity. More importantly I was impacted by no migration solution for the loss of Firepath, a Firebug add-on. Sure there is an Xpath console in dev tools but it is broken for me and even if it worked the extra keystrokes to work in console rather than simply using the Firepath search box would slow me down - hamper productivity.
For anyone that has used both it is obvious how superior Firebug is compared to dev tools. What really is going through the heads that they would destroy a perfectly effective productivity tool for a tool that obviously is far from there yet.
So ultimately I was forced to switch to Palemoon where Firebug and Firepath still work. The only problem with Palemoon is that Firebug is only 1.x so I lost some functions in the network performance window. For that I have to also run Firefox, so another really pain in the ass using two browsers thanks to Mozilla's decision to kill off Firebug.
Does anybody care what Firefox does anymore? They have taken themselves from being a serious contender for top browser to an irrelevant Chrome clone so comprehensively over the past three or four years that in a fair world, the top 100 people drawing a salary would be fired for cause.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Waterfox, a fork that supports 'legacy' extensions and better privacy by default.
https://www.waterfoxproject.or...
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Those who care about software freedom (which certainly should be people on technical discussion sites) care and don't cave into handing Google control over their data or their computer. Therefore running the spy agency's preferred browser (Google Chrome) is out both because it's nonfree software (which also eliminates other browsers from consideration) and because its owned by a known spy agency.
Digital Citizen
Nobody that matters uses this browser, give up
Mozilla spent a couple of years integrating Firebug into their own devtools (with the help of Firebug devs, no less). Firebug itself still has its supporters, but it's essentially been deadweight for years, and most of those supporters are clinging to a couple of features and rarely seem to realize how far the Firefox devtools have come along to just being Firebug.
And on top of that, Firefox devs have been decoupling those tools from Firefox again, basically making a new Firebug that's called debugger.html, is able to update on its own, to be removed entirely from Firefox, and can be re-used by other projects like Servo. Ultimately it's basically coming full circle, with Firebug being recreated in everything but name only (and I wouldn't be surprised if they change the name back to Firebug when they're done, since debugger.html doesn't exactly roll off the tongue).
I honestly don't know why this article is reaching so hard to present a misinterpretation, because anyone could have spent a few minutes searching online or asking the Firefox devtools team what's really happening here: they're just finally retiring the old legacy addon, which hardly matters as it has become inferior with the exception of a couple of UI niceties that are already being ported into the new devtools, without all the slowness, limitations, and flakiness of the legacy addon. The only merit that addon has now is that it works with backwards forks and ancient versions of Firefox that don't have better modern devtools already.
It has been 8 or more years since Firebug was the top dog. In that time we got better tools in almost every browser, and it's time to let the old hound retire with some grace, not keep it on extended life support.
Shame this has pretty much killed web automation on Firefox. XPath support through Firebug and Firepath was unrivalled but at a stroke this moves to Chrome. Firefox dev tools have some serious XPath bugs, combined with less features.
I had used it for years, but the last few version it didn't quite work anymore, to the point that I started using chrome debugger. I removed firebug and started using the native tools of firefox, which are okay, better at least as chrome...
I tried WF.. was ok, but too many compat probs with older FF (was still running last pre-4.0 version at the time) addins. Instead I later found Pale Moon, which has tried to provide compat support for many older FF addins. When I first found P.M. it was able to support FF's older plugins with few or no changes.
Pale Moon has moved forward, but not at the same pace as FF -- trying to provide support and ports of older FF extensions for years -- to allow gradual moving to newer extension-models. The project lead even provided a compatibility tool months in advance, to tell you exactly which of your extensions would work, need updating or replacement, *months* before a newer, incompatible add-on model was released -- something that was VERY useful, and with it's detail, almost unheard-of in the SW industry these days.
PM has a FF-masquerade mode, where it can ID itself as FF, and gain FF compatibility with many of the FF extensions on AMO (FF addons.mozilla.org site) still working, though usually one had to use a addon for an earlier FF as current FF-add-ons had tried to go for current FF compat.
The 64-bit space really helps. w/memory issues -- though with 32-bit
FF, modding the binary to give a 3GB/1GB User:System address space (vs. 2/2) REALLY helped tide me over until I found an acceptable 64-bit solution. With a 3G/1G address space you get a 50% increase in user address space which really relieved memory pressure until a reasonable 64-bit version could come out.
I haven't tried WaterFox recently, but it didn't have the same goals of trying to support previous add-on models that PM has had. Alert -- would need to an alternate browser to access this site (I maintain current IE+Opera versions to provide backup access to sites) as only supports newer encryption models ( Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s)). SSL labs gives it an A+ for encryption usage, BUT says This site works only in browsers with SNI support. ?? Oh well...
FWIW, I'm writing this with Palemoon right now. At http://www.palemoon.org/, it mentions its latest release (v27.5.1) being less than 3 weeks ago on 2017-10-10. Also has an active user forum which is helpful for find solutions to various problems.
Streaming can suck it, I have 80gb music locally
It's better and newer, and dark themed unlike shit white Chrome
I install at least three browsers on every desktop I configure for our Windows users. FF, Chrome and IE 11.
When Edge is the only browser supported in Windows, sometime after Win Pro 10, it is going to really be worse.
At least you have the option of using either Chrome or FIrefox now...perhaps not so much on a Windows box down the road.
Remember when we all said corporations would never adopt the pay per month as you go model, well with Windows 10, that is the only model they can select and they are buying it.
Home users are next, than they will start giving functionality to Edge that you can not get in either Chrome or Firefox...then what....
Browser wars all over again....its going to get worse before/if it ever gets better
The shortcut is now ctrl+shift+Q in FF57, probably for exactly that reason.
Eat the rich.
Which extensions are those?
Eat the rich.
Which extensions would that be?
Eat the rich.
Your feeling would be wrong, then.
All of what you mention is still 100% possible.
Eat the rich.
That's still close to the "switch to previous tab" shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+Tab) on a non-French keyboard.
You can continue to argue that all key combinations are close to other key combinations ad infinitum.
At some point you just have to slow down a teeny tiny bit, and not simply slam your clumsy meat mittens on the keyboard and hoping for a positive result.
Alternatively, you could enable "browser.showQuitWarning" in about:config. It'll pop up a warning if you accidentally press ctrl+shift+Q.
Eat the rich.
Add-ons Links
Firefox, WaterFox, and Pale Moon Browsers
For security: Get add-ons only from Mozilla.org web pages.
Pale moon add-ons
List:
"This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017."
"This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017 and Mozilla drops support for XUL / XPCOM / legacy add-ons. It should still work on Firefox 52 ESR until ESR moves to Firefox 59 ESR in 2018 (~Q2)".
"There is no 'please port it' or 'please add support for it' this time, because the entire add-on eco system changes and the technology behind this kind of add-on gets dropped without replacement."
A hell of a lot of those extensions are completely redundant. Ublock Origin and Privacy Badger takes care of just about everything ad/privacy-related, perhaps with Decentraleyes on top to avoid tracking by JS hosting sites (including Google), and possibly speed up browsing.
That takes care of Adblock Latitude, Betterprivacy, Canvasblocker, Ghostery, Facebook Blocker, Stop Fingerprinting, Twitter Disconnect and Disconnect (Disconnect's filters can be added in uBlock Origin).
Classic Theme Restorer is more or less redundant when looking at the Photon redesign and customization.
FF57 doesn't autoplay videos if the tab isn't in focus, and there's an option in about:config to completely disable autoplay.
HTTPS Everywhere is available in the dev channel for FF57 beta and will be released concurrently with FF57.
Similarly, NoScript will be released in webext format when FF57 comes out mid-November. As a much more powerful alternative, uMatrix is available.
Nuke Anything Enhanced is available, as you noted.
I think you should weed out your list of extensions and get rid of the redundant ones. It is typically users with a ton (perhaps too many) of extensions that report stability issues on Firefox. I bet you've built up this list of addons over the years, and never weeded out any of them. Maybe it's time.
As far as I can see, all of the essential addons are either already available for FF57, or will be come mid-November.
Eat the rich.
Wow! You are more knowledgeable than I about add-ons. I will do some research and modify my list.
Except that Joel thinks that he knows better the Fred Brooks
It is interesting to note that Brooks recants this in the latest version of MythicalManMonth, where he says "This I now perceived to be wrong, not because it is too radical, but because it is too simplistic. The biggest mistake in the 'Build one to throw away' concept is that it implicitly assumes the classical sequential or waterfall model of software construction." -- The Mythical Man-Month, 20th Anniversary Edition, pg. 265 ISBN 0201835959
The problem is that the 1st version has so many hacks that it becomes unmaintainable.
Meskimen's Law
Adblock Plus and FireFTP I've read statements from saying reduced functionality maybe and completely impossible. I also have CookieCuller, Cookie Manager, and Saved Password Editor which are all still saying Legacy. These 3 seem simple enough but maybe there won't be anything in FF57. I'm not going to waste my time upgrading and searching for replacements though just because FF wants to break backwards compatibility. Nuke Anything is the only extension that seems like it will work if I upgrade to FF57, and that's not really as important as the other ones.
Morphing Software
You really should be using uBlock Origin instead of Adblock Plus. It's faster and doesn't allow ads to slip through if the ad company pays off the devs, like with ABP's "acceptable ads".
Regarding FireFTP, it simply seems like the developer is butthurt for no reason, which seems to be ridiculously common among geeks, probably somewhere on the spectrum, usually considering themselves "omnologists". Yes, some functionality is no longer available, because it could be used as an attack vector by malicious XUL extensions. If I may be so blunt: Use an actual FTP client instead.
For password editing, the API is being added probably to FF58 or possibly 59. Or they could be adding the functionality directly to the browser. You can edit the saved passwords already without an extension, but I assume you want to add new custom ones?
CookieCuller has been abandoned by the dev, but there are active maintained alternatives.
Eat the rich.