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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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