~robcee/ more than just sandwiches

Firebug 1.3.4b1

Late last week, a number of users reported some strange behavior with Firebug 1.3.3 and Firefox 3.0.7. Pages with lots of JavaScript files being imported through XmlHttpRequests were freezing with Firebug installed and activated. For those interested in the discovery process, you can view the discussion page on the Firebug discussion group. We filed Issue 1565 to track the problem.

To see the issue yourself, with Firefox 3.0.7 and Firebug 1.3.3 installed and everything (console, script and net panels) turned on,

1. open www.panoramio.com
2. open Firebug and enable console, script, and net panels
3. reload (Cmd-R)
4. select a picture in the minimap area.
5. click on the inset picture that pops up

It’s pretty easy to see. Clicking on one of the little pictures causes Firefox to freeze with a “Read ajax.googleapis.com” message in the status bar. Clicking Reload will load up the next page.

Jan “Honza” Odvarko chewed on this a bit over the weekend and determined that there was a deadlock occurring between Firebug’s cache (used to prevent occurrences of the “Double Load” problem, among other things) and Firefox’ own cache. He came up with a work-around to avoid checking Firebug’s cache in certain situations.

This morning we created beta builds of Firebug 1.3.4b1 and put them up in http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.3 and 1.3X (should be available around 1800UTC). They contain this patch and nothing else and verifies that the user is in Firefox 3.0.7 before avoiding the problem code. While Honza maintains that this won’t cause a sudden recurrence of the double load issue, he is concerned about users seeing “failed to load source” errors. The underlying cause of this change appears to be in the Firefox code itself and I’ve filed bug 482293 to track this regression.

As always, please file bugs in our issues tracker or drop us a line in the discussion group for questions or feedback.