Why haven't we seen a Firebug plugin for Chrome?
Andrew
Because Chrome Lite is a compromise. I would be able to fully switch
to Chrome if there was a fully-featured Chrome extension, yet there's
not even one promised on getfirebug.com?
John J Barton
jjb
Andrew
I hate about it most is that because the work is done for free, it's
hard to dictate what you want people to contribute to most.
Chrome is the future of the web.
On Jun 16, 11:38 am, John J Barton <johnjbar...@johnjbarton.com>
wrote:
dmccunney
> I'm not a plugin developer. I love open-source and all, but the thing
> I hate about it most is that because the work is done for free, it's
> hard to dictate what you want people to contribute to most.
Since open source developers aren't normally getting paid for what
they do, they work on stuff that *they* want. If that happens to
coincide with what you want, splendid. If not, you can ask for what
you want and hope they agree it's a good idea, contribute code that
does what you want, and/or donate $ to help fund their efforts.
(Donations often make coders more amenable to suggestion. :) )
There are substantial differences between the API provided by Firefox
and the API provided by Chrome, so you won't get feature equivalence
in Firebug. Some things Firebug does under FF simply can't be done in
Chrome because the underlying infrastructure doesn't exist. FB's
Firebug Lite branch got a rewrite that bases it more firmly in
Firebug's core and reuses a lot of code, so you can anticipate more
stuff appearing in the 1.4 branch of lite that will bring it to closer
correspondence with FB on Firefox. Pedro Simonetti seems to be the
main driver on that side. See http://getfirebug.com/firebuglite for
details.
> Chrome is the future of the web.
Your web, maybe. I have Chrome here, but it has yet to approach FF's
power for the sort of stuff I do.
______
Dennis
Pedro Simonetti Garcia
Is there some limitation with the Chrome extension API or something?
Compared to Firefox's extension ecosystem, Chrome is indeed very limited, so I believe you may never see the exact same features running on both platforms.
On the other hand, there's a lot more we (current Firebug developers and future contributors) can do. Since I started working on Firebug Lite a couple of years ago I envisioned porting Firebug (at least most it) to other platforms. After working a lot on porting Firebug code I realized that in order to have a feature rich and future proof Firebug on other platforms, we would have to do more than porting code from Firefox to other platform, but rather, sharing the common code across different platforms (maintaining two different projects of +40k lines of code is just not viable).
At the same time, Firefox is evolving, and the upcoming changes (like the multiprocess architecture, and the new extension API aka JetPack) and new requirements (remote and mobile debugging) made us to rethink our steps. We are now working hard to make Firebug compatible with the new Firefox architecture that is about to come, to be able to debug remote and mobile applications, and also be compatible with multiple platforms.
In other words, Firebug will soon have a completely new architecture that will allow us to share code across Firefox and other browsers, among other cool things. But the path is long and we have a limited number of developers working on the project. So, contributions from the community are very welcome!
I'm not a plugin developer.
Firebug is 99% JavaScript + HTML + CSS, so you don't have to be a "plugin" developer. Just a "web" developer. And I suppose you are one! :D
Chrome is the future of the web.
Chrome is just another web browser. The web is way more than a browser. Even so, when evaluating a web browser we must pay attention not only to speed and memory consumption, but also processing consumption, extension ecosystem, freedom to fully extend the browser, privacy, security, and lots of other stuff. What I'm trying to say is that no browser is the best one. It could be the best one *for a particular reason*, *for a particular set of users*. Chrome is a impressive browser, and a strong competitor to IE and Firefox, but in my humble opinion Firefox is still the best browser out there *for me*.
Pedro Simonetti.