Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
in the foreword, this topic is in honour of two friends, Carl Backstrom and Scott Spadafore. I'll always
remember something Carl once told me:
“Even if you have to deploy to Internet Explorer, develop in Firefox—it'll make your life so much
easier.”
The reason he said this was that Firefox (certainly at the time) was a much friendlier browser for
developers, since it gave much better debugging and inspection capabilities. The other reason was
because of the Firebug plug-in. This plug-in alone transformed my web development. Looking back
now, it's hard to remember just what an impact the Firebug plug-in made, since most browsers these
days (such as Safari, Chrome, and the latest Internet Explorer) give similar functionality, but Firebug was
really groundbreaking—so much so that I still use it today.
You can obtain Firebug (which only works as a Firefox plug-in) from
http://getfirebug.com
. When
you install Firebug you can inspect and evaluate any site that is open in your browser. For example, in
Figure 1-9 you can examine the individual requests for resources in my page using Firebug.
Figure 1-9.
Examining page requests using Firebug
Now, I'm not going to cover the full capabilities of Firebug (again, that could be a chapter in its own
right), but you can see in Figure 1-9 that using the Net tab, you can get a very nice visual overview of all
the resources (such as JavaScript files, CSS files, and images) that are referenced in the page. Firebug also
gives you details about the size of each of those resources and how long it took to download them from
the web server.
