Lacisoft's » firebug

Opera 10 looks good aka browser wars are back on

lacisoft — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:53:59 +0000

I’ve just tested Opera 10 with its new Presto 2.2 rendering engine and it seems that Google Chrome has some competition on the speed factor. Opera 10 loads somewhat slower then Google Chrome but much faster as Firefox. It renders pages faster then Firefox but i couldn’t decide wich one is faster Chrome or Opera 10 (need some benchmarks on this). Opera 10 also has an Acid 3 score of 100/100!

Still neither Opera neither Chrome will take Firefox’s place in my navigational behavior. That is because neither of them has something like Firebug. I’ve just come to the conclusion that i cannot use a browser without a good inspecting tool like Firebug. Sure you could argue that they have something like that. Yes, but it is far behind Firebug!

Opera 10, Chrome 1, Firefox 3.1, IE 8 and Safari. So who said that browser wars ended ? They just starting.

The 5 best Firefox extensions for web developers

lacisoft — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 06:53:49 +0000

Making feature rich and complex web applications can be sometimes challenging but if you don’t have the correct tools for doing your job it can be really painful. For those working on new websites or debugging already exisiting websites there are a couple of Firefox extensions that can really make your life easier and also help you improving the speed and quality of your work. During the last years i got used with some extensions and now i cannot conceive my work without them. Every time i reinstall my system these are the first things that got installed after Firefox. And the reason i don’t use Chrome yet for everything is the lack of some extensions of this kind.

So here are the extensions recommended by me (they are listed after the order i started to use them):

1. Firebug – has evolved in the greatest tool for web developers. Everyone i know, working in this field is using it. With the help of this addon you can monitor and debug live the CSS, HTML and Javascript in your webpage. It will help you find errors and review the output generated by your site.

2. ColorZilla – it features an Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker and PageZoomer. I use it mainly for capturing the colors displayed here and there and to verify if colors are what it should be.

3. MeasureIt – allows you to measure the dimensions of web page elements. You can drag boxes and view the dimensions of these boxes. So you can really easily get an ideea of what is the size of any object in the page you are viewing or developing.

4. JSView – is an enhancement to the View Source feature of browsers. Because View Source only shows you the source of the webpage, (without additional files like external javascript files) i use this tool to view all files and their sources included externally. This consist mainly in additional javascript and css files and JSView is the right tool to view them when needed.

5. FirePHP – it is a Firebug extensions so you will need Firebug (first in my list) and an external library that you will use it PHP files. So what FirePHP does ? It allows you to debug your PHP code and view the results in the Firebug console. You just include the FirePHP library in your webpage and make a call like

$firephp->log($var, 'My Variable');

The value of the $var variable will be outputed to the Firebug console. This is very handy especially when you debug live websites and you need to output some variable but that would disrupt the aspect of your webpage. This way using FirePHP the output you are sending to the browser is available to those who have FirePHP installed. The output is sent to the browser through some special headers generated by FirePHP.

Conclusion

Sure there are many other extensions that are very useful for programmers but these 5 are the ones i use most.

Do you have extensions that makes your life easier?

Firebug is available for Firefox 3

lacisoft — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:51:08 +0000

I’ve been long waiting for this. Finally every web developer’s must have tool Firebug has been released for Firefox 3. Although Firefox 3 is still in testing, one Release Candidate (RC1) is available. I’ve already started using FF because it is much faster then its predecessor so it is a pleasure working with the browser. Until now i hade one major setback, i couldn’t use Firebug on it, but now that it is available i will say farewell to Firefox 2.

You can download Firebug from here: http://getfirebug.com/releases/index.html