Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

The always amazing Joe Hewitt, one half of Parakey Inc., has just released a beta of the world's greatest web development tool, Firebug 1.0 Beta. For those of you who don't already know, Firebug is the world's greatest web development tool. (Seriously.) Firebug integrates with Firefox to give web developers everything needed to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. It does all of this with the unparalleled user experience that Joe has established a reputation for over the last half decade.

What many of you may not know, even those of you who have been using Firebug, is that Joe's invested most of the last year building this amazing resource, at the expense of time put into Parakey's main product. He was considered releasing Firebug as shareware to raise money and hire a full-time Firebug developer to keep it going while he returned focus to the core Parakey product. Despite the major investment of time and money, Joe's decided to release Firebug 1.0 as free and open source software. While that's a big win for open source, without a full-time developer, Firebug isn't likely to move forward the way it could. If Firebug development is going to continue, companies and individuals who appreciate Firebug need to step forward and donate so that Joe can hire at least one full-time engineer to keep it going strong.

If you haven't used Firebug and you do any web development work, you should get Firebug today! If you're already using it then you know how amazing it is and you have no doubt already saved yourself hours and hours of pain so help keep it going.