• Firebug 1.3.0b2 is available on getfirebug.com
• Discussed Honza’s awesome improvements to the Net panel
• Discussed John Resig’s further efforts on FireUnit and NetUnit integration
• Starting to push new code to 1.4 branch, 1.3 for bugfixes and cleanup only.

That’s the short version.

The longer version includes some good discussion about the net panel improvements, including some ideas for color improvements and drawing MozAfterPaint events on top of time-lines. We’re starting to see some additional load events super-imposed on the network traffic now, so the term “Net panel” is probably going to be replaced with something like, Construction Timeline in a later version. I don’t know what that name will be yet.

Resig’s improvements to FireUnit include a test-runner mechanism for running through a set of chrome files containing unittests. He’s also making good progress on integrating Honza’s NetUnit tests which will include the httpd.js server for hosting locally stored tests. We’re getting that much closer to having a usable unittest solution.

That’s not to say that we have full unittest coverage yet. I spent a couple of days messing around last week trying to write some Script panel unittests but ended up scrapping them because I coded around the thing I was trying to test. It was educational at least. I’ve moved back to working on rewriting some of the packaging tools so we can have a saner, cross-platform mechanism for building the extension and stripping out all the debugging and tracing code. Hint: It will probably be written in a language named for a certain non-venomous snake.

Not mentioned in the bullets, John Barton has moved Chromebug into the google code repository we’re using for Firebug. Feel free to check it out and give it a whirl. We should be much closer to having Chromebug in a usable state where Firefox and extension developers can start using it.

Oh, and one last thing: For all you testers running nightlies, we’re going to bump the MaxVersion on Firebug to 3.1 so you can start re-enabling your compatibility checks. Note that Firebug 1.3 on Firefox 3.1 will be considered experimental and useful for testing purposes only. We know there are problems, but we need to track them down and fix them in Firebug 1.4. If you encounter a problem, do a search in our Issues database and if you don’t find it, file it!