Goodbye Firebug. It’s Time to Use Firefox Dev Tools Instead.
For many years, Firebug was one of the most helpful tools available to web developers and designers.
Firebug, launched back in 2006, was an add-on that integrated with the Firefox browser. It helped you to inspect HTML elements and modify your designs directly in the browser.
However, Firebug has reached the end of the road after 10 years. Go to the Firebug website and you’ll see this message:
This awesome piece of software was developed and maintained by Joe Hewitt, Jan Odvarko, robcee and the Firebug Working Group.
I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to the whole Firebug team for helping to make our web design work easier.
Here at OSTraining, we often recommended Firebug to our customers when they had issues or were learning web development. It was the easiest way to find bugs on your sites. Before Firebug, debugging a website was a complex task.
Don’t worry! There are alternatives to Firebug.
The major browsers, including Firefox, already have their own inspect tool with similar capabilities to Firebug. The Firefox team recommends Firefox’s built-in DevTools. There’s also the Web Developer plugin for Firefox, and we have a video class on Web Developer.
UPDATE: Firebug’s features will be rolled into Dev Tools.
UPDATE: since Firebug is not supported anymore. Please try Dev Tools in Firefox, or Developer Tools in Chrome instead.
“It helped you to insect HTML elements”
I know that’s a typo, but it made me laugh because it’s right next to the Firebug logo (which is, uh, an insect).
Thanks Spudley. You spotted the deliberate error 🙂
Wow – a legend dies! It definitely has changed my life and work. It has saved tons of time and extended my knowledge. BIG THANK YOU!
Yeah, it’s a shame to see it go, although it looks like most of the features will live on.
Right. No tears, just feeling thankful and want to express my deep appreciation.
Chrome Dev Tools in Chrome Browser is as good as Firebug and far better than Firefoxes built in dev tools.
Hi Topaz
Some of our team do indeed use Chromes Dev Tools. If you prefer Chrome it is definitely worth using.
I am grateful for the time we did have Firebug, but SO disappointed that they stopped maintaining it! The new tools are not as good. Sigh.
Indeed! Firebug was an awesome tool!
hi all, in combination with firebug we were using firepath plug in, to evaluate xpath. That part is definitely missing in firefox devtool, is there any alternative option for the same ???
exactly. with this combination one could do css and xpath locators. using the Eval bar at the top of the displayed DOM you could experiment with locators and use them in selenium. i would gladly pay for a tool that could do this. there has to be many QA automation engineers that use this. i have the FF version 55.0.3 installed and still use it. it’s baffling that this was removed.
thanks bob…
Install firefox 50 with firebug 2.0.15 and stop the firefox updates. It will never die then 🙂
And I need to use a Firebug extension… guess they decided I don’t need to. That’s great. I guess instead of fixing my script I’ll just sit here and stare at the wall.
Exempt this page
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You can try [url=https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chropath-for-firefox/]ChroPath[/url]