Tuesday March 28

Fun with FireBug: It Doesn't Explode

Some websites (*cough*gmail*cough*) are so diseased with errors and warnings that they can actually cause FireBug to freeze up the entire browser. FireBug 0.3 has protection against these websites. If too many messages are logged to the console in too short of an interval, FireBug will ignore them and write just a single warning message:

If you want to turn off this protection, uncheck "Throttle Messages" in the Options menu.

Fun with FireBug: CSS Quick Search

The quick search box has a secret. When you're looking at the Source inspector, you can type any CSS selector into the quick search window to show all elements that match the pattern.

For the moment, this is the only way to search the Source, but in the future I plan to also support XPath selectors or just plain text searching.

Here's a fun example. Say you're using the Dojo toolkit and you want to see only the elements which are Dojo widgets. Just type this in the quick search box: *[dojoType]

Fun with FireBug: Object Hyperlinks

This is the first in a short series of FireBug tips and tricks I'll be sharing this week.

If you write a reference to an object in the FireBug console, that object is a clickable hyperlink. Clicking the object will take you to the Inspector with that object selected in the most appropriate tab.

Note that this applies not only to objects that come from the command line, but also objects passed to the printfire() function. So don't just think of printfire as a way to log plain text, but also these inspectable object hyperlinks.

FireBug 0.3 Done

After a long weekend of slaving away on FireBug, I've finally uploaded the final 0.3 build to the Firefox extensions website. Go ahead and install it. I know you want to!

This release brings with it a whole lot of changes, primarily with the way FireBug's inspectors work. I got really annoyed with FireBug's old inspection system, which resulted in an extremely cluttered console. I won't try to explain the new way in words, just check out these screen shots and you'll get the picture.

A quick list of the new features:

* "View Source Live"
* Computed style inspector
* Events inspector
* Quick search filtering
* Crash protection against sites with a bazillion errors
* DOM editing

Over the next few days I'll be blogging regularly with a bunch of fun tips and tricks that I've been compiling for how to get the most out of FireBug. Subscribe to this blog for daily updates.

Please visit the FireBug Forums if you have any bugs to report or features to request.

Many thanks to the handful of brave souls who helped me test this new release and gave me extremely helpful feedback along the way.