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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. Re:As usual, Mozilla doesn't care about users by theweatherelectric · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Firefox is dead by ArhcAngel · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  3. 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 -(

  4. Re: Firefox is dead by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.