Comments on: Firebug Features Poll part 1

By: Mark T.

Mark T. — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:18:37 +0000

I am in charge of the UI of an enterprise product, and my work encompasses both CSS and JavaScript. When building a very dynamic page, CSS is often used for functional placement of page elements, JavaScript is the logic behind the components, and the XHR requests in the console give visibility into the AJAX calls being made for additional data.

I understand that designers can be very focused on the CSS styling, but a generalized dynamic UI guy/gal also spends a large amount of time making sure the page elements are positioned correctly. Maybe the roles in a web design and development house are more clearly delineated.

By: robcee

robcee — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:19:27 +0000

hi again, Bill.

Thanks for returning and writing this excellent analysis. It’s blog-worthy in its own right.

I think your examples of personalities are pretty good. It’s something I’ve thought for awhile about our user base. I expect there’s also some overlap among them. Some coders and skinners will be using extensions. Some skinners code. Everybody uses the Inspector at some time. Sometimes you just want to hack a little JS for a bookmarklet or Greasemonkey… I’m not sure extenders are their own distinct user type as most people will find extensions to assist them in whatever development or analysis task they have. Or use other extensions within Firefox like the Web Developer Toolbar or LiveHTTPHeaders.

While my poll wasn’t exactly comprehensive, I believe it paints a pretty accurate picture of what the majority of users turn to Firebug for. I don’t think anyone will argue that the Inspector and HTML+CSS views are where a lot of people spend a lot of their time. I have a feeling that your percentages of personalities are a little off and that the skinners probably outweigh the coders by 10-15%, but it’s hard to say for sure. Hopefully at some point we’ll be able to back this up with real scientific data, but for now, it’s just interesting to hear about how (some!) people are using Firebug.

Thanks for the feedback!

By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:19:09 +0000

There are several very different segments in the firebug user base. I would guess that about 10-15% of the firebug users don’t use it to actually do anything, simply to play around looking at stuff. Here where I work that group consists of the people performing QA. Among them they mostly use the inspect stuff and the net panel to monitor bad requests. Out of the rest I suspect that about half are dealing with design and half dealing with functionality. From personal experience based on how my coworkers use it, the designers are going to obviously use the inspect related functionality, and the coders will use the Console, Script, HTML and Net tabs. Additionally I know there exists a small, yet significant, user population which uses an entirely different set of functionality than everyone else. These are the ones who extend firebug with things like Firediff or YSlow. The features that these people use may be entirely different than whatever everyone else uses but nevertheless are just as important.

At least the following “user personalities” exist:
1. viewers – use firebug to view aspects of a page/set of pages (guessing 15% of users)
2. skinners – use firebug to help debug designs (guessing 42%)
3. coders – use firebug to help debug javascript, server issues, etc (guessing 42%)
4. extenders – extend firebug with new functionality they want/need (guessing 1%)

As a user in any of those personalities, you would likely use Firebug very different than someone else.

I think it was a bit flawed because:
1. whatever our favorite feature is at the moment is likely to change.
2. the segmented nature of firebug’s userbase should give you several favorite features
3. with an open-ended question like this we cannot know if responses that say the same thing really mean the same feature or if they mean something completely different

Being as 3/4 of your responses listed basically the same feature, I strongly question the validity of the survey. Without a doubt the inspect related functionality will be high on everybody’s list, but probably not more than 60% overall.

By: ~robcee/ » Blog Archive » Firebug Features Poll part 2 – The Unloved

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:24:35 +0000

[...] is the second part of the Firebug Features Poll (part 1 is here). This time, focusing on the answers to the question: What is your least favorite Firebug feature. [...]

By: Encuesta de Características de Firebug ~ parte 1 « Notas de un Peregrino

Encuesta de Características de Firebug ~ parte 1 « Notas de un Peregrino — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:23:06 +0000

[...] Post original de Rob Campbell Aquí [...]

By: robcee

robcee — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:30:18 +0000

@Bill: you say you think it was a little bit flawed, could you explain why? I stated up-front in the first paragraph that it was informal, non-scientific and from a small sample set.

Still, your vote for the debugger has been counted!

By: Daniel Nautré

Daniel Nautré — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:30:28 +0000

Inspect is a very useful feature for sure, it really helps me debugging my CSS. The console and the net panel are also very useful, no doubt about it. The 2 things I never use are the CSS and the DOM panel, they seems kinda redundant.

keep up with the good work, firebug changed my life (at least the part of my life where i build websites).

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:19:10 +0000

I think your informal study was at least a little bit flawed. If I had to pick my favorite feature I would probably say the debugger, but I think that many features are critical to my work.