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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.
What on earth are you talking about? You clearly DO NOT use Firefox at all. None of what you described has been a thing in Firefox for years. Memory leaks in the Firefox 4 days were a major issue but they're barely even on the radar today.
Actually, I've seen it bloat up to 3GB quite a lot lately on Windows at work. No idea what's causing it. Prior to v56 it was generally using about 500MB tops, but now it regularly goes over 2GB after an hour or so of casual use. And this is a bit of a problem because the work laptops only have 8GB and our dev environment wants most of that.
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
I actually have a Firefox update waiting to install. I wonder if that will fix it. I've grown quite cynical about Firefox despite my overall positive view of it because Mozilla doesn't listen to the users, so even though I hope it does...I doubt it.
Whats better than making the same mistake once? Making it twice of course.
"His name was James Damore."
Yeah, I thought all the browsers on my Mac sucked, in that they all used a lot of CPU (using 35-45% of 4 cores while just sitting there displaying pages), but it turned out that something was physically wrong with my Mac (not exactly what, but had to replace the motherboard). Get it back and now CPU is down to under 10% idle in browsers... yay!
And Firefox used to also be a memory pig, it would normally sit at about 4 Gb of VM (I normally have a lot of open tabs), but every once in awhile, it would just blow up and increase it's vm space until my Mac would grind to a halt. If I noticed it happening in time, I could force-quit it, but if I don't (or it happens while I'm not sitting there), my Mac would be unusable trying to force-quit Firefox, it would be faster to force-reboot the Mac (as in force-shutdown the computer, not a clean reboot). But starting earlier this year, Firefox no longer has done this.
Now firefox works really well for me, and all the extensions I use have been updated to the new api...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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 -(
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.
I agree. I have the new firefox and I REALLY miss firebug.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow. How sad.
My father is retired and 70 now. He was once a nerd who used to do punch card programming back during the IBM mainframe 360 days. He is out of date with computer knowledge and industry for awhile now, but still uses Firefox. He is loyal because he saved us from MS owning the internet and reading about the nightmares of IE 6 early last decade.
I share his sentiment. I was a rapid Firefox fanboy back when it was called Phoenix and it was a secret geek thing like Linux today. My how times change and is sombering because I have not run Firefox as my main browser in GOSH half a decade now since early 2011 when Chrome 6 and IE 9 were so much better options and FAST on my dual core AMD laptop. Firefox 3.6 was meh and getting slloow and used up lots of ram.
What did mozilla do? They released 4.0 and did the disaster constant update! It was worse. Websites would break, plugins kept breaking, things would always change which made corporate America about to kick Firefoxes ass BACK OUT and replace it with IE all over again! Grrr
Chrome was fast and IE 9 was now standards compliant with smooth hardware acceleration and was light. I started using Chrome and haven't looked back.
Interestingly, I found out Chrome OS and the Chrome browser was originally using Mozilla Gecko internally. The engineers at Google decided WebKit was far superior to work with and more modular without Netscape crud and legacy stuff. This meant much better security and a model where you can update every 6 weeks without breaking plugins too. This is a classic lesson of poor leadership and management in the graveyard of once good technology and should be a lesson in the future. WinAMP, Lotus Notes, AIM, are examples. I fear Linux is heading in that direction now too with shitty guis, SystemD, pulseAudio, Wayland, and no real leadership or designs or goals.
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.
Goodbye Mozilla. Sorry it didn't work out and will always remember you.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Wait so IE was stalled and ignored only? Hmm. I beg to differ. True Firefox was more standard compliant and added more things quicker and that I agree. But it ignored it's users and it's core competency as a lean mean and detailed browser. By 2010 the world was moving towards having a browser fill out the forms, frequently used passwords, bookmark synchronization, modern security with threading, etc.
Maybe Mozilla suffered from too much technical debt with Gecko which had even more technical debt from Netscape.
Microsoft wanted IE to match the version of Windows as most users like my Mom do not know what a browser is. Look at this hilarious video?
I think in 2017 that hopefully is not true but in the 2000s it was Windows to get on the internet etc. Windows Longhorn had a release date of 2004 so IE 7 was going to be included and we all know what happened with that? Oddly, XP stuck around until 2014 thanks to IE 6 still being used in the office for 13 years!!! Thanks Sap, Workday, and horribly written VBScript .HTA apps. Anyways Firefox and IE just did not keep up with the times, but in different ways. WinAMP can still play video and .mp3 files fine, but because it didn't have a streaming service became obsolete unlike RealNetwork which sucked ass. Both went the way of the dodo bird thanks to Spotify and Pandora.
http://saveie6.com/
The web is supposed to be fragmented? I'm going to assume you have no idea what you said, because the alternative is too scary.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
for all intensive purposes.
Nicely done. For all intents and purposes Firebug was quite good at intensive purposes, like web development. Killing it makes me realize its a doggy dog world.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Firefox 57.0b12 on Windows 7, 15 tabs open, using less than 500MB.
You're right that something is wrong, but it probably isn't Firefox.
Eat the rich.