I’ve been using Firefox for quite allot of time now, and I got used to many extensions I could not live without in the day to day development life. Firebug is one of these. When somebody told me: You can’t call yourself a web developer unless you have Firebug installed, I thought this was a bit to hard. But after I faced many situations where Firebug was the definitive tool, I really think everybody should use it.

I often have to do some work on websites in other browsers (Ex: IE – eeeek I know). This is when I really feel I like and I miss Firebug. I really love to see how asynchronous requests are performing (network monitor), I really love how you can inspect and edit DOM elements, I really love to edit the DOM on the fly and see the effects instantaneously, I really love to edit the CSS on the fly and see the effects, you guessed it: instantaneously. I also love that it has got a JavaScript Console where I can test my jQuery magic on the fly. Then there is the fact that it logs JavaScript errors and I also need to mention I love that I can debug JavaScript with it.

The good news is that there is a JavaScript library called Firebug Lite, which as a matter of fact integrates Firebug into your DOM. This actually means that it can work in “any” browser.

Can I have FireBug functionality in Internet Explorer, I hear you asking!?!? YES, as said, any browser. According to the official website the following browsers are supported: Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari. I should not mention Firefox here as we have the original Firebug extension.

You can work in two ways with Firebug:
1) You either work with it in offline applications by downloading the JavaScript library and integrating the js into your HTML. or…
2) You can bookmark the following link: Firebug Lite which will bring up the Firebug console on the currently displayed page (bookmarklet).

We all have our preferred products, and it’s the same for browsers: my choice is definitely Firefox for now, but using Firebug Lite you can now enjoy your preferred browser with the excellent functionality of Firebug.

This might not be latest hour information and I apologize for those who already know about Firebug lite, but sadly this concept isn’t spread well enough throughout the world of web development, so this is my little contribution to this. 

I kindly invite you to visit the official Firebug website for further information, screenshot from different browsers, etc.