firebug is a plugin for firefox that makes configuring out html pages and the stuff in it a lot easier – inspecting and modifying html, css, javascript and, last but not least, showing all the files that are loaded when a page loads. The last thing is great to check which things are cached (that makes a page much faster to load, and decreases the things your server has to serve – thus increasing its’ capacity).
I’m working on a couple of sites, and firebug has been very helpful. I especially like the javascript console, that helped me to get some difficult FireWatir tests to run – the console allows me to see what javascript works in the page, and do little experiments that I can then transfer to the test script once it works.
The only downside is that firebug does not seem to play nicely with some other firefox extensions (most notably web developer toolbar and possibly selenium), so if you try it out you might want to do so in a separate profile. I find the effort worth it though – firebug makes my try-automated integrationtest-code cycle a lot quicker…
Right now I have firebug side by side with jssh (the javascript shell needed by FireWatir), and that works well.
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