For about a year, Firebug was horribly unstable for me. It seemed that each time they introduced a bunch of new features, the crashing, hanging, and erratic behavior (e.g. breaking at a line of source code far removed from the actual breakpoint) got worse. Happily, though, the last release before this current one reversed that trend. It didn't eliminate the problems but it did make them tolerable, which was a relief. I hope this one doesn't revive the previous tradition!
I think part of the problem is that FB wasn't designed to work with large (or even medium-sized) JS programs. We bundle all our JS into one HTTP request. It's a few thousand lines, which is big enough to cause FB noticeable trouble. A lot of the fancy features they've been adding are pretty useless to me; I wish they would simply make the console and the debugger rock solid. (And fix things like the horrible way they print arrays...)
What I do is have a separate *_debug.html page, which loads the js files individually. I.e., I have a python build script that auto builds the main.html and main_debug.html from much smaller html, css and js files. This is particularly useful when debugging older versions of IE.
For the live non-debug version I also YUI-compress the concatenated js file.
Yes! People always point out to me that Chrome has built-in powerful Web Inspector and I don't have to go back to Firefox to keep using firebug. Web Inspector _might_ be a powerful dev tool but firebug is very intuitive to me for quick look-ups on the source. I really hope they can do a full firebug port on chrome, this is the only thing that's stopping me from using Chrome exclusively. But I doubt this will happen, because Chrome extension frame work in its current form has limited functionality, unlike Firefox.
I haven't found Chrome's debugging tools inferior to Firebug. I therefore use Chrome for increased browser startup time and reduced memory usage. What feature of Firebug do you use that Chrome doesn't have?
I had the same issue on x64 fedora 11, but found a workaround (although a bit annoying one). Delete the .mozilla directory and start firefox, install firebug, then it works. I tried messing with files left behind from the previous firebug individually, but couldn't find a specific culprit...
Annoying bug, this is just a temporary workaround.
I just upgraded to this (Leopard 10.5, FF 3.5.7), and the feature I used the most is now borked. Right-clicking an element and selecting "inspect element", or expanding Firebug and expanding the nested child elements (clicking the arrow to expand the contents of the div > the form > the fieldset > the input) is now completely broken. Has anybody else had this happen? Any fixes you can recommend?
I've been using this since early beta. It's performance is worse than 1.3.x. The new features are miniscule at best. I happened to open an older VM the other day that was running FF3.0 and Firebug 1.2. I was shocked at how fast it was compared to the newer versions. I had forgotten. They need to stop worrying about new features and focus on speed.
I think part of the problem is that FB wasn't designed to work with large (or even medium-sized) JS programs. We bundle all our JS into one HTTP request. It's a few thousand lines, which is big enough to cause FB noticeable trouble. A lot of the fancy features they've been adding are pretty useless to me; I wish they would simply make the console and the debugger rock solid. (And fix things like the horrible way they print arrays...)