Venkman

» see mozilla.org/projects/venkman as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Firebug is the one I remember. Venkman is the one that came first, and I could not tell you whether I ever opened it, which is the most honest thing available to me about a tool that sat inside the browser I was using and that I had no particular reason to reach for. The engineers who did reach for it in 2002 had nothing else to reach for.

The lineage starts before Mozilla existed as a product. John Bandhauer wrote a JavaScript debugger for Netscape 4 in 1998 and, more consequentially, built the js/jsd interface underneath it, the hook that lets an outside program watch the JavaScript engine execute. Everything after that stood on it. In April 2001 Robert Ginda began building a new debugger on top of Bandhauer's work for the Mozilla codebase, and by 3 October 2001 it was in the standard distribution.

The design decision worth remembering is that Venkman was written in JavaScript. The interface was XUL, the logic was JavaScript, and the whole thing reached down to the engine through XPCOM. A JavaScript debugger written in the language it debugged, running inside the browser as an ordinary extension, at a time when debugging web code anywhere else meant inserting alert boxes and reloading the page.

It shipped preinstalled in the Mozilla Suite from 1.7 onward and in SeaMonkey, and it was available as an XPI for Firefox, for Netscape 7 and 9, and for the Nvu and KompoZer editors. Mozilla's own pages never explained the name.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually did ~

Breakpoints, a call stack, a watch window, stepping through code one line at a time, and a profiler. In 2002 that list describes something no other browser offered a web developer in any form. Internet Explorer had the Microsoft Script Debugger, which was a separate install and widely disliked. Everything else had nothing, and the working method was to print a value to a dialog box and see what came out.

~ the slow part ~

Venkman did not die in one move. Its homepage fell out of sync with the software in 2005 and never caught up again. Ginda moved on, maintenance passed to volunteers, and the most visible of those was Karsten Düsterloh, whose name was still on the Mozilla wiki page at the end. The last version anyone shipped was 0.9.87.4. The wiki page describing the project was last edited on 27 May 2011, and the status it gave was hibernation.

Firebug is what took the users. Joe Hewitt released it in 2006 as a Firefox extension that inspected the DOM in the same panel as the JavaScript, and it did not ask you to treat debugging as a separate mode you entered and left. Venkman was a debugger. Firebug was a place you lived while building a page, and the second idea won so completely that Chrome built it in and every browser since has done the same.

~ what replaced it ~

Alex Vincent wrote the obituary before the death, in a post titled R.I.P., Venkman, arguing that it could not be supported much longer and needed replacing. He was right, and the replacement was not an extension at all. Mozilla built a debugger into Firefox itself, which is where every browser has kept one ever since.

The formal end came on 14 October 2014 with Firefox 33, which removed the interfaces Venkman depended on. Nobody rewrote it against the new ones, because the work was large and the reason to do it had gone. Thirteen years earlier it had been the only way in the world to watch a web page think.

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