Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar, and IEDevToolbar was superior to Firebug for years for debugging JavaScript.
So not a very good example at all, in fact quite the opposite, it just happened to ride the back of the anti-M$ wave and wasn't at all innovative, copying its features from already existing products.
Conversely, though it was free, IEDevToolbar was only really advertised to MSDN subscribers, so never got much penetration, especially as by then everyone hated IE6 and a lot of Devs worked in Firefox first.
But my company only supported IE6, and when we finally started supporting Firefox, firebug was an annoyingly sub-par experience when debugging js.
Even Chrome's early Dev tools had some sorely missed features when it first came out, as far as I can remember it took them years to support being able to just hold your mouse over a variable and see its value. And because it was a web-page about a web-page you got all these weird bugs. And the CSS editor was (and still is) super annoying with its attempts to cut up your text.
On top of that visual studio also had a JavaScript debugger, I'm sure there were plenty more paid tools you simply didn't know about.
(Joe Hewitt created DOM Inspector and checked it in to CVS while working at Netscape. Robert Ginda had separately created Venkman. Firebug used the XPCOM interfaces that had been created to allow for Venkman's debugging capabilities, but IMO was always inferior to the much more powerful Venkman, even if Firebug was slightly prettier to look at. PS: shame on Mozilla for breaking those links. Do you even know how to Web?)
> Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar
I'm not sure that even if you focus purely on Firebug and ignore DOM Inspector and Venkman that this is even true. Do you have a source for that?
Venkman was hard to use, and mostly focused on the internals of Mozilla. Firebug wasn't just prettier; it was much more usable, and it focused on actual website code. Hence the difference in popularity.
> Firebug wasn't just prettier; it was much more usable
Venkman made some debatable decisions about UI defaults, as is the case with a lot of tools built by old school programmers trying to solve their own problems, but it was more customizable, flexible, and powerful (as is the case with a lot of tools built by old school programmers...). Aside from Firebug's template-based rich console, every feature implemented in Firebug's debug pane was implemented in Venkman, except Venkman gave you even more latitude and control. Firebug's debug pane was a basic UI over a subset of Venkman's APIs, after all, as previously mentioned. It was only many years later (much closer to Firebug's death than its birth) that Firebug got some improvements like showing a variable's value in the source window while stopped at a breakpoint without having to type it into the console (or set a watch on it, or look at its activation record entry). Venkman never had that, but it pales in comparison to all the things that Venkman could do that Firebug did not.
Firebug made its own share of dumb decisions, and the degree of dumb in those instances was higher.
> [Firebug] focused on actual website code
I'm not sure how it could be "focused on actual website code". Venkman was a straightforward JS debugger. (The only way this could possibly make sense is if you're referring to all the stuff baked into Firebug outside it's debug pane—style sheets, live view of document nodes, cookies, and so on; all things outside the purview of a language debugger—in which case it becomes an apples and oranges comparison. It would make more sense to criticize DOM Inspector for any of those things than Venkman. And once again—there were plenty of dumb decisions by Firebug in that comparison is concerned.)
> if you're referring to all the stuff baked into Firebug outside it's debug pane
Yes, you're focusing on the debugger only. The fact is, most people simply did not use Venkman since it was hard to understand how to use it, for what context it was meant. Firebug tied the debugger into a wider context, making it more accessible, and reached a level of popularity that Venkman never had.
That feels a bit like advocating that it was mainly Betamax which changed consumer habits in the 90s since it was technically superior to VHS.
It may very well have been the case for a small number of MS centric devs, but for the large majority of users, it was Firebug that really changed the game for the bulk of Frontend devs back then.
As a user of both Firebug and IE's Devtoolbar I can state this is simply not true.
While I agree that IE's devtools had more features regarding xpath integration, you'll also had the problem that it was based on libxml (yes, the reason trident was exploitable for decades, and probably still is).
IE's devtools didn't have access to the DOM and only had access to the HTML/SGML/actually XML representation _before_ it was parsed into the DOM.
This gave you hundreds of error scenarios where debugging user events was simply impossible if they caused the DOM to change, something like adding a node or debugging a parentNode was impossible in trident.
And oh how often have I seen bugs in websites that were relying on specified flow roots that behaved differently in trident. Something like an unclosed <p> in the wrong place could easily mess up everything in trident and switch it to quirks mode.
Remember IE was exploitable via a parentNode.remove(parentNode), too? The hooks for devtools was the underlying reason.
I am not sure why you claim that IE had superior devtools experience. You must have done a lot of ActiveX related development, because everything else was impossible to debug in my opinion.
The best thing MS did was to create the Edge team that tried to refactor trident, and soon realized that it's impossible and instead started over from scratch.
At least Firebug was attached to a good browser. IE6 was terrible to use so being able to develop in Firefox with a decent debugging experience improved web development
So not a very good example at all, in fact quite the opposite, it just happened to ride the back of the anti-M$ wave and wasn't at all innovative, copying its features from already existing products.
Conversely, though it was free, IEDevToolbar was only really advertised to MSDN subscribers, so never got much penetration, especially as by then everyone hated IE6 and a lot of Devs worked in Firefox first.
But my company only supported IE6, and when we finally started supporting Firefox, firebug was an annoyingly sub-par experience when debugging js.
Even Chrome's early Dev tools had some sorely missed features when it first came out, as far as I can remember it took them years to support being able to just hold your mouse over a variable and see its value. And because it was a web-page about a web-page you got all these weird bugs. And the CSS editor was (and still is) super annoying with its attempts to cut up your text.
On top of that visual studio also had a JavaScript debugger, I'm sure there were plenty more paid tools you simply didn't know about.