In case you haven’t heard, yesterday Firebug 1.5.0 was released by Joe Hewitt, Rob Campbell and the rest of the gang at the FirebugWorkingGroup. New for this release, which is apparently a big one, is an enhanced Inspector, improved HTML editing and a lot more. Digital Media Minute did a very popular Firebug tutorial screencast a while back, by the way.
Year-end is as good a time as any to post a list from Lifehacker of some of the most popular Firefox extensions and themes of the past year. I installed Vacuum Places Improved and FireFound– check them out.
Mouse dominance won’t go away overnight, but soon it won’t be the only way, and things are going to change quickly. Windows 7 will offer good support for touchscreen hardware, and take a look at early multitouch support on Firefox. Instead of just mouse events, web developers will have a whole bunch of new tools to work with, and obviously users will have all kinds of new games and interfaces– it’s exciting stuff.
Multitouch on Firefox from Felipe on Vimeo.
From that master of life-hackery Tim Ferriss of all people, here’s a small tip for making a screengrab of an entire page (or any part of a page that you need). I shoulda known there was a Firefox extension.
Digital Media Minute has a popular screencast on debugging JavaScript with Firebug, the popular Firefox plugin. Now there is FirePHP, a debugger for PHP which extends Firebug with an API for PHP web app developers. Six Revisions has a nice overview of the functionality. The jury is out on whether it compares favorably to xdebug and Eclipse PDT, for example.
Digital Media Minute did a post a while ago about the location of the Firefox cache.
To change Firefox cache location, add the “browser.cache.disk.parent_directory” preference (by editing your configuration) and enter a folder path. When you specify this preference, a new directory, “Cache” will be created at the path you have set.
These other two preferences must set as follows (edit configuration):
Set “browser.cache.disk.enable” to ‘true’ to store cache on the hard drive. (The default is true.)
Set “browser.cache.disk.capacity” to a positive integer equal to the max hard drive space in KB to use for cache. (Firefox default is 50000 KB)
Also, for Windows, the path separator must be 2 backslashes (for example “C:\\Path\\To\\Parent”), if the “browser.cache.disk.parent_directory” value is set in prefs.js or user.js file rather than about:config.
We have written about upcoming changes to Firefox before, but here’s a fairly big one: the Jetpack browser API, announced today, is Mozilla’s response to developer input as to potential improvements to the current Firefox browser API, specifically the process of creating Firefox extensions.
A primary goal with Jetpack is that only basic web development skills (HTML, JavaScript and CSS) will be needed to create add-ons.
Development is still in the early stages, but other improvements will include: no browser restart for installation, improved debugging tools, improved packaging, etc. Some are already asking if a new browser API will divert development resources away from Greasemonkey, but clearly it opens up extensions development in Firefox to many people who might not have previously been capable. Stay tuned.
If you use Firefox as your primary browser for debugging your Flex applications, you may want to read this bug report before you upgrade you browser to Firefox 3…
[#FB-13064] Firefox 3 and Flex Debug Not Working
If you must have the latest and greatest Firefox, you can always use the workaround of debugging with Safari or Internet Explorer!
I’ve updated my Prevent Dupliate Tabs Firefox extension to allow for whitelisting of URLs that should be prevented from being opened in duplicate tabs. You can grab latest version here. Read the instructions about the new UI, checkout the changelog, and take a look at what I have planned next.
I created the extension to solve an annoyance that has always bugged me about Flex Builder, or more specifically any Eclipse based tool (ie. Aptana). When you click the Run/Debug/Build button (or F11/ctrl-11) your project is always opened up in a new browser tab. It doesn’t take long until you realize that you have 20 tabs open!
Earlier this week, I wrote a Firefox extension to prevent duplicate tabs from opening. Reader Jimmy Fung posted a comment with a link to Firefox 2 and Flex: Launching builds in the same window. It makes my extension somewhat (alright completely) useless – but hey, I learned a lot about making Firefox extensions in the process!
