Firebug was some truly excellent work - but I think it's worth also mentionining its precursor Venkman - which in turn built upon the js/jsd low-level debugging APIs inside the mozilla suite.
> I think it's worth also mentionining its precursor Venkman
Is it, really? The experience of Venkman was horrendous. Not quite as bad as MS’s Script Debugger (I don’t remember venkman crashing multiple times per session, and it was able to debug the toplevel frame), but still just awful all around.
And more relevant, it was nothing special, at least that I remember. It was notable in being a “normal” extension, but that aside it was a pretty standard if not sub-par debugger experience for the time.
I do remember Venkman crashing multiple times, but to be fair it was the older "sort of stand-alone"-ish Venkman. The later version packed as an extension was a bit more stable.
But going back to the relevance subject, I don't really think it is worth mentioning. But not because of performance but because it was a fairly different thing. Mostly just a JS debugger with a couple of additional tools and little/no support. Usually you would need a bunch of other scripts such as XRAY [0] and others to reach a functionality somewhat comparable to Firebug.
Strong disagree. Compared to Venkman, Firebug had the following misfeatures:
- modal interface*
- bloat
- dubious** interface labels, like "DOM" (or whatever) to look at the object's property tree
- totally sucked at debugging any part of the Gecko runtime/toolkit code, or anything that wasn't a Web page (including e.g. Firebug's own code)
* This is a misfeature that every browser's built-in devtools copied, and it's completely mystifying. Thanks, Firebug, but I want the script debugger to be separate from the DOM Inspector, so I can have both on screen at the same time (and I want to be able to have multiple inspectors for multiple objects open at the same time, too, for that matter, so I don't have to keep flipping back and forth between them like I'm navigating fullscreen mobile apps and being forced to think through a straw. I don't even use multiple large displays; I use a 13" laptop screen for everything. No idea why all the proponents of large, multi-screen setups don't bristle about this to an even noisier degree.)
** Generous description; "inaccurate" (or just plain "wrong") would be accurate
I think I just answered that. It's also a piece of software, not a person. The sort of criticism I gave (especially in response to a remark that described another piece of software as "horrendous") is imminently fair game.
As for persons, I like the decisions that Hewitt made when he made DOM Inspector before going on to do Firebug. It was like UNIX pipes (incl. that you can string them together to arbitrary lengths), but with dynamic visual inspectors on each side, instead of bytestreams/text. Firebug was not that. It was one step forward, two steps back.
https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/
edit: there's a nice write-up of how firebug got started here https://flailingmonkey.com/the-history-of-firebug