Use Firebug Lite To Debug Cross-Browser Issues

Sunday, 14 February 2010

Debug web pages in any browser where you want them to work perfectly using Firebug Lite - a lightweight cross-browser version of the popular Firebug web developer extension to Firefox browser that gives you the ability to troubleshoot and fix web design cross-browser compatibility issues.

Firebug Lite is implemented as a client-side JavaScript code that you can easily include in your web pages to bring-in the familiar Firebug visual interface, rich representation of DOM elements and some of its powerful debugging functions to any browser including IE6+, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera. Extend it to add features to make it even more powerful!

The latest release, Firebug Lite 1.3 beta, features major improvements. These include significant performance boosts, compatibility with XHTML and XML+XSL documents and more. It is more stable than ever.

How to run Firebug Lite on a web page?

There are two methods to use Firebug Lite on a web page:

Statically linking to the JavaScript code with <script> tags

Insert one of the HTML codes below at the top of the tags of your web page.

When using Firebug Lite while online, link to the hosted version at getfirebug.com:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/beta/firebug.jgz"></script>

When using Firebug Lite while offline, download the Javascript code and link to the local copy:
```
<script type="text/javascript" src="/local/path/to/firebug.jgz"></script>
```

Because Firebug Lite is always loaded every time the page is viewed, this method is only suitable for debugging the development version of your web pages. You can also use server-side scripts to restrict Firebug Lite from normal users and to make it available to web developers only.

Dynamically linking using a bookmarklet

Bookmark the link below and drag bookmark button to any page you wish to inspect.

Firebug Lite 1.3b

This method is useful when you want to inspect web pages without the need to insert HTML codes to include the JavaScript manually. The bookmarklet does it for you on the fly.

While Firebug Lite does not have all the powerful features of Firebug, it made troubleshooting and fixing cross-browser related issues a lot easier and faster than ever.

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