Firebug

» see getfirebug.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Firebug was on every machine I did browser work on from around 2007. Broadband had reached Turkish homes by then and the modem years were behind me, but a web page was still a sealed object. You could read the source the server sent. You could not see what the browser had actually built out of it.

Joe Hewitt released Firebug in January 2006 and it did the obvious thing nobody had shipped: it opened the live document. Not the file, the tree the browser was holding in memory at that second. You clicked an element and got the box it occupied and the exact CSS rule that had won the fight for it.

Then you could edit it. Change a color in the panel and the page changed while you watched, no save, no reload. That single behavior rewrote how people learned front-end work, because it turned every website on the internet into something you could take apart without permission.

I am not a front-end person by trade and I still installed it on every profile. It was the tool you reached for when something looked wrong and the source told you nothing, which for a while described most of the web.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The inspector is the part everyone remembers, but the console did more damage to the old way of working. Before Firebug, debugging JavaScript in Firefox meant alert boxes. Firebug gave you a real console with breakpoints and a call stack you could step through.

The network panel came later and was arguably the bigger gift. It drew every request the page made as a bar on a timeline, so you could see which image was holding the whole thing hostage. Web performance work as a discipline starts roughly there. Firebug Lite pushed a stripped version into Internet Explorer and early Chrome as a bookmarklet, which mattered because the browsers people had to support were not the browser developers used.

~ the decline ~

Firebug was built on XUL, the same technology Firefox itself was made of, which is exactly what let it reach so deeply into the browser. That access was the whole product and it was also the liability. Every time Mozilla changed something internal, Firebug broke.

Mozilla shipped its own developer tools starting around 2010 and they were, at first, worse. They also improved every six weeks and did not break when the browser did. By the time work began on a Firebug rewrite that would sit on top of the built-in tools instead of beside them, the argument was already lost. Version 2.0.19 landed on 16 February 2017 and was the last release. Firefox 57 arrived on 14 November that year without support for the old extension format, and Firebug simply stopped loading.

~ what came after ~

Open the developer tools in any browser today and you are looking at Firebug's layout. Elements on one side, styles on the other, with the console and the network timeline behind tabs across the top. Chrome DevTools took the shape almost intact and Safari came around to it too.

The Mozilla people who wrote the goodbye post said as much, that Firebug was living on inside Firefox rather than ending. That is true and it is also the tidy version. The less tidy version is that a volunteer project made an entire industry's tooling obsolete by demonstrating what it should be, and then got outrun by the vendors who copied it and had staff.

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