Firebug 1.2 released

Firebug 1.2, the latest version of the Javascript, HTML and CSS debugging extension for Firefox, has been released after may months in beta. John Resig, JavaScript evangelist at Mozilla Corporation announced the new release, slightly ahead of it appearing on the FireFox Add-ons site, but it was available immediately at the Get Firebug site. This release is now officially compatible with Firefox 3. Numerous improvements have been made to the various display panels of Firebug, and a number of as yet undisclosed security enhancements have been made to the Firebug console.

The most major change is that Firebug is more aggressive about being turned off by default. When the Javascript debugger and network monitoring in Firebug are active, they are active for all browsed pages, and measurements showed all JavaScript execution being slowed by 25 per cent. Firebug has tried to alleviate this problem by allowing developers to select which pages will activate selected Firebug panels. To complement this change, there is also a global Suspend/Resume option for Firebug to quickly override those selections. The Firebug developers are looking at the underlying performance problems and working with the Firefox team to find a way to resolve them.

Looking forward, in the announcement Resig said "Firebug 1.3 is going to be all about performance, quality, and testing. Firebug is the de facto tool for web developers and we need to make sure that its quality does not wane and that we tackle performance head-on".

(djwm)