Sure, you love the full-bodied debugging environment that comes with Firebug 1.2, but when you’re on the move, jumping from browser to browser, you just can’t get weighed down by being tied to Firefox all day. When I’m surfing Safari, live at the Opera, or kickin’ with IE, I debug with Firebug Lite, now with more debug!
Let’s start to mix commercial metaphors: this is not your father’s Firebug Lite! More than just a console, this Bug is completely tricked out with HTML, DOM, CSS, Script and XHR (XMLHtmlRequest) inspectors. There’s even a JavaScript console. All this comes with a much slicker presentation, as well, making it nearly as useful as it’s big brother on Firefox.
The Firebug Lite web site has complete and simple instructions for embedding it into your pages, but if you don’t want to go to all that trouble (or you’re just snooping around on a random cool page), you can use Firebug Lite anywhere with this cool bookmarklet from the Get Firebug Lite home page. Just drag the link to your bookmarks, and away you go! Go ahead, click it. You’ll get all the Firebug Lite goodness right here on this blog! For those of us who have to use a proxy server to do our work, you can still use the bookmarklet by adding two domains to your exceptions: *.getfirebug.com and *.appspot.com. In IE6, you can find this in Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections (Tab) -> LAN Settings -> Advanced. Why they hosted the image and the script on different domains, I don’t know, but you need to add both for a working Firebug bookmarklet.
Firebug Lite is no longer the wobbly toddler of a debugger with unsure steps and limited functionality; he’s grown up into that awkard teenage phase. Pretty soon, he’ll be asking for the keys to the family browser. It’s almost enough to not make you miss all of Firefox’s cool developer plugins. Okay, maybe not, but it sure beats the pants off of the IE Developer Toolbar!