Video: Joe Hewitt Talks About FireBug

By Eric MiragliaMay 30th, 2006

Joe Hewitt, a longtime Mozilla/Firefox engineer and the author of DOM Inspector, recently made a return to frontend development after many years working on browser code. He found that the state of the art in terms of tooling hadn’t advanced much since his days as a DHTML author in the late 1990s.

While many frontend engineers have lamented the state of debugging tools in the JavaScript development arena, Joe reacted in a singularly useful fashion: He set about in January 2006 to create a Firefox extension that brought together some of the great strengths of Venkman and DOM Inspector in an integrated, lightweight interface. Adding features inspired by sources ranging from Python to Prototype, he’s been evolving FireBug for the past five months and developing a cult following of developers who are finding FireBug to be an essential part of their toolkit.

Joe stopped by Yahoo! last week to talk to the Y! frontend engineering community about FireBug. He was kind enough to let us capture the talk on video, and we’re pleased to share the core part of his talk with you here. We apologize for the poor audio quality, which does not do full justice to the quality of Joe’s presentation, but we wanted to help get the message out about FireBug.

Note: This presentation can be viewed directly on Yahoo! Video

21 Comments

  1. I must have lost the invite in my inbox to miss this one. Was Joe in Sunnyvale?

  2. keep the video’s comming and better luck with the audio next time!

  3. [...] Joe Hewitt, welcher FireBug entwickelt hat, war letzte Woche bei Yahoo! und hat über FireBug vor den Yahoo! Frontend Entwicklern gesprochen. Gestern wurde dieses Quicktime Video auf dem Yahoo User Interface Blog veröffentlicht. In seinem Vortrag geht er einige JavaScript Szenarien live durch und man kann erkennen was so alles mit FireBug möglich ist. Das Video ist nicht von bester Qualität aber dennoch kann man es verstehen. [...]

  4. [...] You can find the actual video of the presentation over on this post, but keep in mind there were a few audio problems, so it’s a bit difficult to hear him over the background noise in some parts. You can still get the ideas that he’s coming across with, however, and that’s what counts. [...]

  5. Great overview, and a Great tool… a must have for Web 2.0 developers, and the video is also appreciated. Keep up the good work!

  6. [...] Posted by Jon Baer Wed, 31 May 2006 13:03:49 GMT Joe Hewitt, a longtime Mozilla/Firefox engineer and the author of DOM Inspector, recently made a return to frontend development after many years working on browser code. He found that the state of the art in terms of tooling hadn’t advanced much since his days as a DHTML author in the late 1990s. Watch video [...]

  7. [...] Video: Joe Hewitt Talks About FireBug » Yahoo! User Interface Blog web — rlarsen on May 31, 2006 at 10:21 am [...]

  8. Firebug is Getting Better and Better…

    The Firebug plugin for Mozilla Firefox just keeps getting better. Joe Hewitt, the author of the plugin, has refined the Javascript console in the latest incarnation, cleaned up the interface for debug logging, and appears to have fixed a bug……

  9. re: Javascript Debugging in Firefox…

  10. FireBug for Firefox…

    Joe Hewitt has just released the latest version of FireBug, a holistic debugging tool for Firefox. FireBug reports on errors and warnings in CSS, JavaScript, AJAX and the DOM, and allows you to inspect and debug each in a handy console. Another very us…

  11. How I snuck into Yahoo! on Joe Hewitt’s back…

    My 15 seconds of (inadvertant?) fame.

    ……

  12. Joe Hewitt Talks About FireBug…

    If you are a Firefox user and web developer, you will have undoubtedly heard about FireBug. FireBug is a great extension to Firefox that adds debug capabilities to web pages. Recently, Joe Hewitt, the developer, visited the Yahoo frontend engineering…..

  13. Debugging Javascript…

  14. [...] Web Debugging With Firebug – Joe Hewitt presents the features of Firebug, a Firefox extension for debugging web pages. [...]

  15. Good info. Good tool.

    I’m not sure what video editing software you use, but you shouldn’t have to pan back and forth between the speaker and presentation screen.

    If you recorded the actions being made on the computer, you should be able to edit them into the video pretty easily and make it easier for viewers to see what is being demonstrated.

    Plus, you wouldn’t have the delay of waiting for the camera to move back and forth and get focused. Just a thought.

    Keep up the good work!
    ~Tim

  16. The video requires some kind of a Apple plugin that’s not available for Linux. Now I know that probably I could hack around it, why not make it more accessible.. Is’t this place about web 2.0 and such.

    ps.
    FireBug rules

  17. Aargh. Can you please disable autoplay. I had about ten tabs open (with pages to read) and suddenly some bad audio came out of my speakers and I had to hunt down the guilty webpage. Bad experience.

  18. [...] Video: Joe Hewitt Talks About FireBug » Yahoo! User Interface Blog A great video of the inventer of Firebug giving the JS nuts at Yahoo a run down on the most useful tool any javascript developer could ever have! (tagged: ajax blogging code debug debugging development firefox js programming tool tutorial video yahoo firebug javascript webdev webdevelopment work web xhtml dom freeware extensions) [...]

  19. [...] Joe Hewitt Talks About FireBug [...]