Firebug 1.0 beta 4
Firebug 1.0 beta 4 was released to the public on the 9th December. Created by Joe Hewitt, a long time Mozilla contributor, has decided to release his work under the same tri-licence as Mozilla Firefox.
Joe Hewitt is working on a new venture called Parakey with Blake Ross, one of the first Firefox developers. This means that Joe will not be able to spend much time on Firebug in the future. He had considered selling Firebug in order to fund the employment of another developer to carry on development while he concentrates on Parakey, but in the end he decided open source was the best option. So if you’re benefitting from this product then they’d appreciate anything you’re willing to donate.
Firebug is an essential tool for web developers offering debugging tools for HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It’s particularly useful for debugging apps that heavily rely on JavaScript such as AJAX apps. It’s only a 288KB download and works with Firefox 2.0. There’s also Firebug Lite, a piece of javascript that provides a basic Firebug console in other browsers including IE, Opera and Safari.