Today Firebug Lite 1.2 was released. This new version was built by Azer Koçulu, creator of pi.debugger. Azer joined the Firebug Working Group, morphed the GUI to look like Firebug, and added it to the Firebug code base.
Firebug Lite is a subset of Firebug that can be used in IE, Opera, and Safari. The previous version provided console.log functionality. In Firebug Lite 1.2, Azer added the ability to inspect DOM elements, track XHRs, and navigate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can embed it in your pages and enable debugging. I prefer creating a Firebug Lite bookmarklet that I can launch on any web page. Instructions and more information are available on the main Firebug Lite page.
I was able to demo this at OSCON today thanks to the folks from Mozilla who are now working on Firebug. As John Resig posted last week, he, Rob Campbell, and Jan Odvarko are going to be focusing on Firebug. Just one week later the benefits from their involvement are already being seen, as Rob quickly got the updates hosted on getfirebug.com. The roadmap for Firebug will be discussed at the upcoming Firefox Summit and the next Firebug Working Group meeting at Google in early August. I’ve been working with Azer testing his releases over the last month. It’s great to have Firebug functionality when I drop into IE. Thanks Azer and Rob!
mdmadph | 25-Jul-08 at 7:38 am | Permalink
Looks like a good start. I couldn’t get the XHR tracker to work, and gawd does it run slow on my dev machine, but looks nice.
AtlantaJones | 28-Jul-08 at 5:24 am | Permalink
This is a great upgrade, with great timing for my team. We’d need to be able to have a link to trigger Firebug Lite in one html frame, but load Firebug into a different frame? Possible?
Simon Brüchner | 28-Jul-08 at 5:55 am | Permalink
Great, great, great!
amidude | 29-Jul-08 at 7:50 am | Permalink
wouldn’t let me drag the link to the bookmarks toolbar in IE 7.
Dan | 29-Jul-08 at 8:12 am | Permalink
Based on my initial testing, this version of Firebug Lite is not working in konqueror.
Can you please confirm this and let me know if there is an ETA on supporting konqueror?
Even without konqueror support, this release is huge and will make my life much easier. Thanks!
Steve Souders | 29-Jul-08 at 8:23 am | Permalink
Please submit bugs and suggestions at http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/list . You can see more information on the Firebug group: http://groups.google.com/group/firebug .
Wayne Pan | 30-Jul-08 at 11:38 am | Permalink
I just tried this on an iPhone and it actually renders. Inspect works and I can type in the console! Resizing the window on pinch is an issue, perhaps we can cook up an iphone version :)
This is rather exciting!
surekha balaji | 27-Aug-08 at 12:14 pm | Permalink
Works great on IE. Can Firebug Lite be used for Javascript profiling and reporting js execution times like that of FireBug?
Steve Souders | 27-Aug-08 at 12:34 pm | Permalink
The internals for JS debugging are completely different across browsers. Eventually it’d be nice to have a version of Firebug with full JS debugging functionality that ran across all browsers, but until then Firebug Lite provides many of Firebug’s other features in a lightweight module.