~robcee/ more than just sandwiches

Firebug 1.4.1 and Some Activation Tips

The Firebug team released version 1.4.1 this week with a bunch of fixes large and small. Hans Hillen added a bunch of fixes for the a11y features, including improved Mac styling, some performance improvements and fixes to the CSS panel. John added a bunch of fixes around the activation mechanism, including a visual glitch that made it look like Firebug was turning off and then on again when a page was reloaded. He also added some additional fixes around JS debugging. Honza released a work-around for a problem where onreadystatechange events were getting lost during AJAX calls in certain situations. (Thanks to Nicholas Zakas for pointing that bug out to us and helping us test it!)

I think the biggest change to Firebug from version 1.3 and earlier is the new activation mechanism and it’s something that can take a bit of getting used to. It’s definitely something we could have blogged more about during the coming months and it still causes some users pain. Honza wrote an excellent introduction to it, which I’ve mentioned here before.

One trick that has stymied some users is how to see an initial request (GET) from an HTTP server if Firebug isn’t active. Or how do you follow Net traffic from one domain to another when you click on a link?

The secret is on the Firebug status icon’s context menu and it’s labelled “On For All Web Pages”.

Selecting this option will open Firebug for any page you visit, giving you a seamless view of your network traffic. Deselecting that option will allow you to turn it off again.

The complementary function, “Off for All Web Pages” will also do a little more than just turn off Firebug. It removes the list of active webpages Firebug has registered, essentially clearing the scene. If you’ve ever visited a webpage and wondered why Firebug was active on it, it’s because you turned it on there before, then probably closed that tab with Firebug still open. Subsequent visits to that or any other webpage you had Firebug opened on (and didn’t turn off!) will reopen Firebug. Selecting “Off For All Web Pages” will clear that list so you don’t have any more surprises.

Don’t forget to turn off “Off For All Web Pages” when you want to use Firebug again. Opening it and pressing reload may confuse you.

(thanks to “brahmana” from IRC for reminding me to write this post)

Lastly, my standard plea: please report any bugs you find on the project’s issues page.

I’ve been tripping up on the new Off button where the Xused to be to minimize it. For the longest time I thought i was simply hiding the Firebug window not deactivating it (which disables the Net tab and the console). I wrote a blog post specifically about the problems I was having with it on my blog http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/firebug-gets-a-little-buggy/

Other than that it is a great release. I love this tool.

The “Off” behavior is very non-obvious. I had accidentally clicked “off for all web pages”, and didn’t realize this meant that a page reload would close any firebug windows or panels I had opened. I was even falling back to IE to debug my pages before I finally found this article. Honestly, I don’t know who would ever want such behavior. There’s a big difference between “off by default” and “actively closes firebug when you reload the page”. To me, it’s still a bug, but I guess I won’t bother reporting it because you consider it a feature.