This is a little different from previous releases. For versions 1.2 and 1.3, we released betas on getfirebug.com and ask users to download from there. We’re adding the betas to AMO this time to allow individuals using Firebug on Firefox 3.0 upgrading to 3.5 to have a seamless upgrade experience. Also, the reason we didn’t enable this for users of Firefox 3.0 is that we feel this is still Beta-level software and didn’t want to throw them into that ring without fair warning first.

What’s new in this release? Quite a lot, actually:

• Accessibility
• New Activation Mechanism
• Net Panel Improvements
• Debugging Improvements
• Bug Fixes

We’ve still got a fair bit of work to do to wrap this up. Templarian’s icon updates are still in the pipe as well as documentation updates and ongoing bugfixes, so stay tuned for more.

To everybody who’s contributed to this release, I would like to extend huge thanks for your help and hard work! Everybody who has tested, reported bugs and joined in on test-day, we couldn’t have gotten here without you.

As always, please report any bugs to http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues. This software is beta!

But first, we’d like some feedback on a little feature introduced with this version. “Minimize to status bar” is the new little down arrow next to the “Open in New Window” and “Close” icons on the tab strip. On the Mac, it looks like this:

Clicking that down arrow will drop the currently open Firebug panel into a new icon on the status bar and leave everything running. This sort of approximates the old behavior where you could turn on Firebug and still close the window and receive updates on the console and net panel, but not requiring a separate window to be active. There was some discussion in today’s meeting about the ramifications of this behavior. I think the biggest contention was having multiple icons on the status bar. As you minimize more Firebug panels, you get more icons. This could look a little strange, but on the plus side, you get a visual indicator of how many Firebugs are actually running.

So, if you’re into testing bleeding edge debugging software, install this into a testing profile and try it out. Leave us a comment here or on the Firebug discussion page.

I would also like to note that auto updates to the 1.4 alpha line should be working again after a somewhat embarrassing typo made by yours truly to the install.rdf file. Thanks to “geki007″ for finding the error!

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.

Improving the Firebug UI – Curtis Bartley’s Blog

He’s got a patch to reorder the tab strip and toolbars that we think makes more sense. So take a look, try it out, and post to the thread in Firebug Working Group’s Discussion Group for feedback. Also, if you’re a Firebug extension developer, testing to see if your extension works with this version would help us out a lot.

In other news, Honza’s been busy making fixes for Firebug 1.3 and we should have a new beta uploaded today. If you’re already on the beta-train, you’ll get the update from getfirebug.com when it arrives. If not, you can grab the latest version from getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.3 Fixes are for some errors in the Net panel around XMLHttpResponse. See issues 1426, 1456 for details.

Lastly, to go along with all these great fixes, Honza’s been adding test cases like a mad-man. He also includes some documentation to go along with them describing where to get the latest test code and how to run it. I’ve copied them to a wiki page on the Firebug Working Group.

Firebug 1.2.1 is not compatible with Firefox 3.1.

That bothers me, but not half-as-much as it probably bothers you, the person trying to debug some web on the latest, fastest, state-of-the-art Firefox (that kicks ass and is really cool and will make you more popular). But don’t fret! It won’t be this way for long. I’m hoping that today or tomorrow we’re going to release Firebug 1.3 on AMO!

Firebug 1.3 is not compatible with Firefox 3.1.

No, I’m not kidding. It sort of works, but there are a number of issues with it. It was never intended to work with Firefox 3.1 and as such, there are some known and probably many more unknown problems.

Let me say what I should have said at the start of this post: If you want to use Firebug with Firefox 3.1, you will need to use Firebug 1.4. Get the latest version from the releases directory and install it up. No compatibility override required. Don’t let the alpha version tag frighten you, it’s really quite decent.

Details about the different versions available on getfirebug.com’s releases page. Worth a read to see all the cool new features that have gone into these upcoming releases.