Kevin Henrikson

I’ve been playing with the Firebug 1.0 private beta for the last few days and it’s quite a tool. v0.4 the last release of Firebug had already combined the most popular features Venkman, Console2, and the DOM inspector. 1.0 adds a entire new set of features. JS profiling and Net request tracing similar to Tamper Data are IMHO the most powerful. Joe has been hard at work and been fising issues as quick as we find them. Firebug now has enough functionality that it could implement and examine all the tips included in my entire presentation at OSCON.

The new website Get Firebug gives you a glimpse of what is coming shortly:

• Inspect and edit HTML
• Tweak CSS to perfection
• Visualize CSS metrics
• Monitor network activity
• Debug and profile JavaScript
• Quickly find errors
• Explode the DOM
• Execute JavaScript on the fly
• Logging for JavaScript

I’ve written about Firefox Plugins before, but since then I’ve made a few more discoveries.

• Firebug (author) - Joe Hewitt author the great DOM inspector wrote what has become the #1 must have for any AJAX dev. Firebug combines the best of Console2, Venkman, and the DOM inspector into a single extension. The console also adds the ability to trace the request/response of each XHR request on the page. Set break points with a simple debugger; statement.
  

  FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

• Tamper Data - Just like Firebug has replaced Venkman, Console2, and the DOM inspector; Tamper Data is the new LiveHTTPHeaders. It provides a similar ability as the Live HTTP Headers extension but adds a much better UI for viewing each browser request. It also adds the ability to graph over time the requests made be each page you inspect. Finally it adds the ability to *tamper* with the requests/responses that it inspects. This is handy when seeing how a new web service or server reacts went sent a slightly different request.
  

  Use tamperdata to view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters.

  Trace and time http response/requests.

  Security test web applications by modifying POST parameters.

Dean Edwards has posted a demo with a cross browser way of super quick DOM queries.

Limitations

* As described earlier, speed improvements only apply on page load for IE. Further DOM queries will use the original getElementsBySelector function
* the speed of CSS2 queries (attribute selectors) are not improved for IE5/6
* because of the nature of the CSS hack, you can only apply one behavior per element :-(

Conclusion

* DOM queries on Firefox seem pretty quick
* XPath is about 150% faster than DOM queries on a Mozilla platform
* XPath is about 1000% faster than DOM queries on an Opera platform
* the expression hack is about 200-400% faster on an IE platform
* Behaviour leaks like a sieve

Gmail and Talk have been having some trouble again. It’s been slow more often than not and I captured a few more *error modes*. Today I saw Gmail chat recover with this little gem. Hey at least they recognized they are back. Seems I’m not the only one who has had trouble with gmail recently.

Gmail greeted me with this screen for a couple hours today.

Seems now that the day is over things are back to normal and Gmail is happy. Well tomorrow is another day… we’ll see how the big G holds up.

ProgrammableWeb.com now has over 500 mashups listed.

As shown on Mashup Feed the average new mashups per day is up to 2.81. And that is just those added to the database here. This is up from 2.6 or so just about 8 weeks ago.

So looks like it may hit 1000 before the year end.