Speed Up Your Client Side Development. Watch the Firebug 1.0 Presentation from the Author.

Posted By : Dan Wilson February 8, 2007 9:02 PM

A wonderful presentation by Joe Hewitt, creator of Firebug is available for viewing at Yahoo Theater. I use Firebug a lot when working with Javascript and Ajax and was pleased to note the new Firebug 1.0 release a few weeks ago. Firebug was already a great productivity tool in my development environment. The new features in Firebug add some real power.

New features include:

A Javascript profiler - excellent for checking the performance of your scripts.
The javascript command line has autocomplete for objects and properties
A dom walker, for inspecting elements and their properties in the DOM.
An inline CSS editor- for tweaking CSS in real time. There is an interesting feature in the CSS editor where selecting a number and using the arrow keys, adjusts the numeric value. Great for keeping your eyes on the design instead of the code
An amazing amount of in-line editing and cross linked properties, for example, in the Javascript debugger, you can put the cursor over a variable and Firebug will show you the value of that variable at the time the breakpoint was hit.

Rather than me banging on about how great it is, have a read directly from the source. These two links got me the most excited:
When your CSS boxes aren't lining up correctly it can be difficult to understand why. Let Firebug be your eyes and it will measure and illustrate all the offsets, margins, padding, and sizes for you.

Firebug includes a powerful JavaScript debugger that lets you pause execution at any time and see what each variable looked like at that moment. If your code is a little sluggish, use the JavaScript profiler to measure performance and find bottlenecks fast.