Firebug 1.0

• Joe Hewitt: web development evolved
• Integrated with Firefox:
• at your finger tips, instant on
• direct reflection of DOM, CSS
• inspect, direct manipulation of debugger
• Huge hit with Web 2.0 developers
• Open sourced Dec. 2006
• Active development ended w/1.05 ~ May 2007

Firebug 1.0 vs Web 2.0

• Firebug awesome, but no eval() debugging
• eval() widely used in Web 2.0
• Basis for Dojo toolkit, JSON data
• No debugging support for eval() in Firebug or Venkman
• Extend Firebug to support eval()?

Firebug 1.1

• Features
• eval() debugging
• executable lines marked
• Call stack side panel
• partial Firefox 3.0 compatiblity
• New XHR spy implementation
...but it was slow
• extended plugin architecture
• editor interaction API
• bug fixes

Firebug 1.2

New Enablement UI

• No cost option
• Independent Console/Script/Net controls

Performance

• re-write javascript debugger
• MD5 instead of encodeURIComponent for eval()

bug fixes

1.3: Testing and Extensions?

Extensions

• Firebug Code Coverage
• Firebug Net Panel History Overlay
• LiveCoder
• Firecookie
• FirePHP
Solidify base, features by extension
• Firequark
• Jiffy
• Pixel Perfect
• Rainbow For Firebug
• YSlow

Chromebug: Firebug for Chrome

• Multi-window/multi-DOM support
• chrome urls, Firefox components, extensions
• Avoid eating your own arm
• Goal: do more than Venkman+DOMInspector
• demo

Firebug Architecture

Visual Architecture (Chromebug Inspect Demo)

Firebug Architecture

Firebug sees Firefox; Users See Tabs

Problems at the Moz Interface

onScriptCreated(jsdIScript, frame) Needs

• script type identifiers (top, inner, eval, event, inline)
• info on compilation unit structure (top vs inner)
• filtering on origin window
• a stack frame (ditto all jsd)
• documented event structure

Missing info

• Event handlers
• Memory queries and GC events
• Closure sizes and contents
• setTimeout and setInterval inspection

More Function

• Control Program Counter, Call stack

Beyond 1.4

• Why is this green? Break on mutation events
• What's happening now? Event/Execution monitoring
• It's Javascript stupid: Direct JSON support
• Make it so: Update w/o reload
• It's perfect now: save edits
• No, it's your fault: Integrated JS/C++ crash analysis
• I've seen this before: socialized error correction
• Cross Site Debugging

Firebug 2.0

• jsDebug 2.0 for Web 2.0
• JSD Built in support for dynamics
• redesign API (stack frames pls!)
• Writable PC/frames
• All-event hook
• GC/Memory hooks
• Migrate firebug-service via shim API
• Mozilla 2
• Debug Support for Tamarin

Discussion

• Joe Hewitt's Firebug is web development evolved
• but it's a bug-eat-bug world out there
• Development tools need our support
• Javascript is not a toy language, it's a vital economic engine
• We need to build more and better development tools for Javascript
• We need to attract JS development tools developers!