Firebug is a free and open source tool, available as a Mozilla Firefox extension, which allows debugging, editing, and monitoring of any website's CSS, HTML, DOM, XHR, and JavaScript. Firebug 1.0 beta was released in December 2006. Firebug usage has grown very quickly since then. Approximately 1.3 million users have Firebug installed as of January 2009. It is a very popular tool among web developers to aid during web application development.
The book begins with the steps to install Firebug, followed by an overview of the Firebug window. We will get the basic idea of Firebug and movement across the different panels and tabs within Firebug.
From there, we will make our way towards more advanced usages of each tab, such as CSS development, JavaScript development, and DOM modification. This will aid us during client-side development and debugging of RIAs. We will also learn to use Firebug for performance tuning our application on the browser. We have also dealt with the tracking of XMLHttpRequest and XMLHttpResponse during AJAX development, which is also an integral part of RIAs. We will also learn a few tips and tricks for Firebug that will help us in configuring Firebug according to our taste and make it a pleasurable experience to work with it.
Once we are comfortable with the usage of Firebug, we will learn to install and use some popular Firebug extensions. This will be followed by a discussion on how to develop our own Firebug extension.