Firebug vs Firefox Development Tools

After switching over to Firefox from Chrome as my day-to-day browser about a month ago, I instinctively installed Firebug because when I used to use Firefox years ago, it was the essential development addon you installed, usually second only to Adblock Plus.

A lot has changed in Firefox over the years. The internal web development tools within Firefox are exceptionally great. In-fact, they are better than Firebug’s own provided tools and a whole lot more stable. If it weren’t for Firebug, the internal tools probably wouldn’t nearly be as good as they are today.

Sadly, the latest versions of Firebug I have used are pretty buggy. For the two or so weeks I used Firebug in Firefox, I encountered annoying issues ranging from inability to remove breakpoints in my scripts to full-blown unresponsiveness when inspecting heavy applications.

The profiling functionality in Firebug also appears to have grown considerably buggier all the while the native tools in Firefox have become a lot better than they were even a year ago. Being native, the Firefox Development Tools will of course be expected to be faster and more stable.

The native Firefox Development Tools also sport some highly useful features missing in Firebug (although these might be features you don’t care for)., designed to make your life easier and rely less on multiple addons to achieve different tasks.

A colour picker (I used to need a separate addon ColorZilla), canvas & WebGL debugging, ability to edit transitions/animations, ability to view objects, pause on exception, easily working with exception and best of all: Responsive Design Mode: this feature is handy for testing a media query laden website without needing to use a separate addon to do so.

The ability to also choose either a light or dark colour scheme is a nifty albeit cosmetic feature. I prefer working with darker UI’s, so I have the dark colour scheme enabled which is easier on my eyes.

While Firebug definitely once served a purpose when there was nothing like it, the native tools are arguably (in my opinion) so much better than Firebug currently offers. We have much to thank Firebug for, but I think it is time to let go and support Firefox’s native tools instead.