Firebug, along with web developer toolbar, changed everything for me. I learnt web development on IE6 by editing html in notepad. I switched to Firefox for tabbed browsing and because it was faster. When I discovered firebug I almost couldn't believe it. What the hell had I been doing up to this point? Why doesn't everyone know about this? Later I discovered that Chrome had it built in and still most web devs hadn't heard of firebug.
Same. I remember what an epiphany Firebug was, and I felt bittersweet later when quality dev tools started being built-in, just because it seemed a little sad to think Firebug wasn’t going to be needed anymore.
Same for me. There was also a time when Chrome dev tools builtin was superiour to the Firefox builtins or Firebug, respectively.
Nowadays, I don't know what to think about built-in dev tools. On the one hand, they promise lowering the entry barrier for fellow ongoing devs. On the other hand, they apparently aren't, because many folks don't care about learning all the basics of HTML, JS, CSS, etc. any more but instead prefer to enter the development world on a framework level. Developer extensions like "Vue tools" make stuff only more complicated, not less, thought.
Errr, firebug was a copy of IE developer toolbar, which was released at least a year before firebug. I think the original IE Dev toolbar beta release was in 2005, maybe 2006? While firebug came out 2007ish. Looks like MS has finally shut down the blog originally announcing it so can't link to it any more.
IE developer toolbar was actually better for quite a while too.
copy implies being of equivalent quality, I seem to remember Firebug being significantly better, although maybe I didn't use the absolutely first version.
It definitely wasn't, it lacked a lot of features of IE Dev toolbar, as far as I remember. Took a few years before it was better, MS let the Dev toolbar drift for a while, and Firebug overtook it. They also didn't promote the toolbar much, which meant a lot of people thought firebug was a revolutionary idea. I seem to remember, and could be wrong as it's a long time ago now, that IE Dev Toolbar's JavaScript support was much better.
Then Chrome came out and most people switched to that, partially as the Dev tools were great, although, again, initially lacked some features so I tended to use a mix of both for about a year. But Google iterated fast and firebug got clunky.
Ok, guess I'll take your word for it, I don't remember when I started with firebug exactly - probably not a super-early adopter though, I tend to let things mature for a bit before using.
Of course it wasn't as IE Dev toolbar was so much worse than Firebug. For example all unhandled exceptions from event handlers would show up in IE Dev toolbar as originated at row 0, column 0 and helpfully showing you the beginning of a JS script. I've wasted _days_ finding out bugs using that wretched tool.
If you had Visual Studio to go with IE6, you had access to simply amazing debugging tools.
Those tools blow even today's Chrome and Firefox dev tools out of the water in terms of accessibility, both in terms of keyboard/mouse and discoverability of interface.
Sadly, few people had access, because you had to either pay or pirate.
I used Firebug on a work site once to quickly demonstrate a potential change to a website. They got angry thinking I had access to the actual site and that I had changed it without permission.
I think many had a similar experience with Firebug, including me. I remembering coming across it for the first time in an issue of Dr Dobb's. I read the article wide-eyed. Truly a "game changer" worthy of the term.
