Get Firebug for Firefox!
Firebug is a plugin for Firefox which is a must-have tool for any web-developer. With Firebug you can edit, debug and monitor HTML, CSS and JavaScript live in any web page. That’s right, you can edit your page live while visiting it! If you aren’t always editing your website from the same computer its very possible you won’t have a local copy. This means making small adjustments or tweaking a CSS files involve uploading the same file to a web-server hundreds of times in order to test and verify the results. Firebug makes this process so much easier. Just edit your website live until you are satisfied, then upload the final changes to your web-server so that all visitors will see the changes.
Firebug also gives you some other very powerful functions. We’ve all been frustrated with elements on our page not lining up properly because of some problem with our CSS file that we have yet to identify. Firebug will actually show you visually all of the offsets, margins, borders, etc, that you have set so you can easily identify the source of any problems.
Another great function is Firebug’s network activity monitor. Firebug will not only tell you how long your pages take to load, but will break this down between the elements on the page which therefore allows you to identify any bottlenecks slowing down your site!
If you are writing any JavaScript for your website, you will also love Firebug’s debugger, which lets you pause your script at any-time to check the state of anything set in the code, such as the values currently held by variables.
If I haven’t convinced you yet that this is a great tool that will speed up your web-development, then visit http://www.getfirebug.com/ now to find out even more about Firebug. Take a look at the screenshots which show Firebug at work!
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