14 DAY TRIAL // Firebug, the popular web development and debugging add-on for Firefox, has gotten a major update reaching version number 1.5.0. It's probably the biggest update since 1.0 and after six months of work and 36 alpha and beta releases, users should definitely be looking forward to the new release.
The dev team is especially proud of the new Inspector, the most stable so far. The new tool gets a Quick Info Box and an Image Map Inspector but also a lot of work under the hood resulting in a performance boost and fixing several "bugs that prevented enter, escape, up & down keys from working correctly in inspect mode"
The Net panel also gets more accurate timings in Firebug 1.5.0 by implementing some work-arounds for problems inherent to using JavaScript as the underlying code. This should further benefit from the fact that Firefox 3.6 is now using native code for the add-ons as well. The end result should be improved performance testing of the web pages. Other highlights of the release include: - Break on HTML mutation - MathML and SVG namespace support - Break on XHR - Improved HTML editing - Persist buttons on Console and Net panel - Separate Computed CSS and Style subpanels
"For this release we’ve worked especially hard on quality. Our pre-release test suite continues to grow: Firebug 1.5 passes all tests on both Firefox 3.5 and 3.6. We’ve fixed a lot of bugs, while also adding enhancements requested by the community. Ultimately this quality derives from community contributions of good bug reports with test cases. We thank everyone who takes the time to help," John Barton wrote on the Firebug blog.
A more thorough run-down of all the updates and fixes can be found here. The team says there will be a couple of small bug-fixing updates in the coming weeks to iron out any of the inevitable kinks that made it through. New features, though, will have to wait for the upcoming Firebug 1.6 which is already being worked on.
Firebug 1.5.0 for Firefox is available for download here.
Firefox for Windows is available for download here. Firefox for Mac OS X is available for download here. Firefox for Linux is available for download here.