Firebug 1.7 Is Now Available, Just in Time for Firefox 4

Firebug 1.7, the popular web development and debugging tool for Firefox, has been released recently, just in time for Firefox 4. Being such an important tool for many developers, it was one of the main reason why they didn't switch to Firefox 4 during the beta or the release candidate phase. But there's no reason to hold back anymore, Firebug 1.7 is here and working perfectly in the latest Firefox.

"After eleven alphas and four betas Firebug Working Group (FWG) is proud to declare victory and release the final Firebug 1.7.0! Of course also Chromebug 1.7.0 is available," Jan Odvarko, the main developer of Firebug, announced.

"This version fixes three bugs reported since the last beta. The main goal of Firebug 1.7 has been full compatibility with Firefox 4... However there are also new features and improvements," he added.

Firebug 1.7 comes with plenty of interesting new features. One of them is support for DOM storage examination. This is available via the DOM panel but also via the Console panel.

Speaking of the console, the Large Command Line now has a History feature to see previous issued commands. You can now sort Computed styles alphabetically, and see the actual value of a Date() object if you log it.

The Break Notification message has been redesigned. It now takes up less space than before and it also informs users how to enable/disable the notification.

Since Firefox 4 dropped the status bar, in an effort to regain as much space as possible for the actual content, the Firebug button has now been relegated to the top toolbar, as most add-ons have done. There is still the option to have it in the small add-on bar at the bottom, enabled mostly for legacy reasons.

There are plenty of other tweaks and new features, you can check out some of them on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

Firebug 1.7 is available for download here.