Something that’s long been on my list is to do a write up on firebug. It’s such an indispensable tool that I can’t imagine my day without it. It’s like trying to understand how people did anything before the internet. Anyway, over at Ajaxian there’s a post about one that Phil Rees wrote up. If you don’t use Firebug (and if you’re reading this blog, you probably do), or if you feel like you’re not getting everything out of it, you should dig through this.

Phil Rees has written up a nice introduction to Firebug, showing us how you can use Firebug to:

  • Inspect custom stylesheets included by Google Mashup Editor
  • Modify in-memory stylesheets to see the changes reflected immediately
  • Place watches and breakpoints into running JavaScript
  • Execute arbitrary JavaScript in the context of your running application
  • Monitor Ajax calls, showing response times, posted content, and results
  • Profile JavaScript functions to help you identify bottlenecks and optimize your application.

The article walks through all of these points using Phil’s DanceMaps mashup using the Google Mashup Editor.