Firebug is a complete web development package that allows you to pinpoint an element in a webpage with ease and precision not only on your website but competing websites too. It will enable you to take a glimpse of what type of addons your competitors have installed so you can mimic their behavior especially if they outrank you in serp’s.
It also lets you take a look at detailed measurements of your site’s network activity. This is great for troubleshooting high bandwidth content. One example would be if you are experience slow page load times, this can be reduced by optimizing images within an image editing program to decrease page load time.
With Firebug you can tweak and move html and css elements to see how it would look before actually make changes to your website. This is great if you have to center content. Instead of having to save multiply times to get the look you’re wanting, you can actually edit the CSS and html in real time. This allows you to write down the settings to get it right the first time when you go to finally edit content.
Another feature is Firebug allows you to measure your JavaScript performance in the Console’s Profiler. This is great for optimizing your website in the long run.
Some other great features straight from the firebug dev team are…
Firebug and Errors
When things go wrong, Firebug lets you know immediately and gives you detailed and useful information about the errors in JavaScript, CSS, and XML.
Status bar error indicator
On the right side of the Firefox browser’s status bar you will see a little green icon. This is Firebug’s way of telling you that everything is A-Ok. When that icon turns into a red “x”, things aren’t so peachy.
Click the “x” to open the Firebug error console which will show you all of the errors that have occurred on the page.
No error soup
Most browsers report errors by dumping them all into one big window that includes the problems with every web page you’ve ever visited. Firebug is kinder than that; it shows you only the errors for the page that you’re looking at.
Informative JavaScript errors
JavaScript errors include a wealth of information about what went wrong, including a description, the file and line number, and the line of source code that caused the error. Even more importantly, if you click the arrow to expand the description you will see a complete stack trace including the values of all function arguments.
Jump to the debugger
Every error report has a link on its right side that points to the file and line number where the error occurred. Clicking this link will take you right to the Firebug JavaScript debugger or CSS inspector so that you can get started on solving the problem right away.
Some errors also include the actual snippet of source that contains the error, which is also a link to the original file.
Quick search
Using the quick search box, you can filter the Firebug Console to show only the errors and messages that match the text that you searched for. As new rows are added to the console, they will only appear if they match the text in the quick search box.
Filtering errors
Firebug is capable of reporting errors in JavaScript, CSS, or XML files. If you only care about some of these languages, uncheck the ones you don’t want to see in the Console’s options menu.
If you are a webmaster and have not tried out Firebug Firefox extension then you’re really missing out on all the features this powerful little tool offers.
This is Scot Manaher signing off! See you on Friday for more niche website tips.
You can get the latest version of firebug here.
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3 Responses to Firebug Webmaster Tools
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you can use firebug for ie if you use internet explorer
Thanks eben I will be sure to check it out. Looks to be a viable solution for FireBug IE. Does it have all the main features Firebug comes with?
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