Firebug 1.6 Feature Wish List

From FirebugWiki

Firebug 1.6 Wish List

After some discussions in the Working Group we've decided to shift some of the 1.6 work to 1.7 and to move up the 1.6 date.

1.6 will focus on Firebug Extension technologies and deliver most of its new function as extensions. The major new work would be the Swarm implementation.

We're aiming for a release in early April. That means we want the beta on March 1st. At that point we can start work on Firebug 1.7

Some of the features can be implemented as separate extensions that could be part of the Firebug bundle.

Independent of Firefox Improvements

Scrolling Panel Tab Bar

Since extensions often create a new panel there is no enough space for displaying all of them. Some scrolling support is necessary.

Scrolling Panel Tab Bar - Design Analysis - See some screenshots about how the scrolling support could look like.

http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=1842

FBTest support for Firebug Extensions

The Swarm will support testing of Firebug Extensions together with Firebug, but using Firebug's tests. We also need a solution for extensions to add their own tests.

Locales as extensions

Having this has two advantages (a) users can switch back to the default en-US language and (b) if some strings are not translated we can use them from the default language Currently the string key (formatted for this purpose) itself is used as the default.

Extension points for panel buttons and main menu options

Some smaller extensions are actually harder to write than new panels because we have no support for adding menu options and buttons.

Breakpoint Column for the HTML panel

Simlarly to the Script, DOM and Net panel, the HTML panel should also offer a vertical column (on the left hand side of the panel content) in order to easily create a breakpoint. HTML mutation breakpoint creation is currently hidden behind a context menu. This will require significant refactoring of the panel content generation (domplate templates).

Break on next CSS change and CSS breakpoints

As far as I know there is no bug for this (in bugzilla) yet and I think we are going to need some new Firefox APIs for this. Anyway, John has some nice ideas how this could be done even without these APIs (at least initially).

Garbage collector events

Displaying of garbage collector events (in the Net panel)? is be also something what has been requested.

Autoscroll Experiment for Console

During a discussion about the autoscroll mechanism in Firebug 1.5, we talked about whether it would make sense to include a "pushpin" to denote if the Scrollbar was locked in place for the Console panel. This could be a useful experiment or might introduce additional clutter if the cleaned-up scrolling mechanism Honza provided for 1.5 is deemed good enough.

Options for BreakOnNext

(mainly UI problem)

Break on next feature should have options for every panel.

XHR: Break on request/response
Script: Break on click, mousemove, etc.
etc.

Net panel improvements

(there are mostly reported issues for these in the FB issue list)

New columns with additional info e.g. IP address (hidden by default?)
Change order of columns
Showing cache reads (not network communication really)

Script panel improvements

Proposals:

Improve the script location menu. Group scripts (by inline, events, evaluated) and use nested menus?
Jump from function calls to their definition.
Jump from the ID defined in getElementById() to element in HTML panel.
Jump from a variable name to the DOM panel by holding down Ctrl and clicking on it.
Every variable could have a context menu entry for putting it to the watch list.

Command line & Console available for all panels

(mainly UI problem)

Issue 768: Allow the command line to be opened and used from the script tab (and perhaps

Firebug feature usage & popularity research

Using Test Pilot?

Javascript Function Support

Rework 'function' support with new jsd features added by Boris recently,

list all of the objects that refer to a function
give the property names