Comments on: Firebug, God damn it

By: Nate

Nate — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:45:49 +0000

Yes, as Tom points out, firefox apparently does not currently offer a way for add-ons to hook into response bodies (except through workaround hacks that are discouraged). Firefox will be patching this with a new interface through which add-ons will be able to deal with this.

Until firefox comes out with the fix, firebug has taken a decent step by disabling the double-posting of pages until the user confirms the action (present in at least firebug 1.2). So double-posting will only happen if you request it. Unfortunately, this still prevents the proper debugging of such pages (since it’s the response body of the second post you’re seeing, not the original).

In any case, this shouldn’t be an issue for much longer. :)

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:15:24 +0000

Michal, I hope you’ve found a solution by now, but if not, I can definitely recommend Charles (www.charlesproxy.com).

It runs a proxy through which all your Firefox/IE requests are automatically passed (when Charles is running), and captures every detail of the communication between the browser and the server.

It’s a lot more powerful than Firebug for debugging AJAX stuff – in fairness to Firebug, however, the double POST thing is a Firefox issue (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430155) – Firebug’s only mistake was that it didn’t used to warn the user it was about to POST again. I’m actually quite surprised I never saw any weird behaviour on sites I’ve worked on due to this bug – must have only occurred in certain situations. Anyway, Firebug is still the best tool for Firefox bar none for JS and CSS/HTML debugging, and Charles is pretty much the ultimate for XHR stuff :)

By: Michal

Michal — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:30:53 +0000

I had the same problem (double execution of ajax actions) and I’ve lost about two days on searching for errors which were not there.

Solution was simple, as Nate wrote above – turning on the option called “Show JavaScript Errors” made my script working again ;)

I thought that Firebug is the best and ‘final’ solution for my debugging problems, but I can see now, that I was very, very wrong… Damn it… Anyone has an idea what other tools should I use for debugging Ajax?

By: Chris H

Chris H — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:21:12 +0000

Yeah this costed me my feeling of control for the last week.
(@opl and @schizoduckie, I am SO glad you are not my colleagues.)

By: Nate

Nate — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:59:42 +0000

I stumbled upon this frustrating bug as well, and am happy to report I found the cause (at least in my case).

If I have firebug set to report JavaScript errors, the double submit (including clicking links and even POST actions!) will occur if a JavaScript error occurs on the page where the submit action takes place. No JS errors, no double submit.

On firebug’s “Console” tab, click the “Options” menu on the right side. When the option “Show JavaScript Errors” is disabled, I don’t get double submit when a JS error occurs. :)

By: Vladimir Cvetic » Firebug, short update on Blog

Vladimir Cvetic » Firebug, short update on Blog — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:05:06 +0000

[...] As I wrote few days back Firebug is indeed the guilty for double page execution. Today I tested it a bit more and found out what is cosing problems. Net option (tracks load times for items on page) executes page for it’s tracking, so we get one exec from browser and second one from firebug. [...]

By: colleague from 313

colleague from 313 — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:46:42 +0000

You should have asked the guys next door for help ;) I disabled FireBug weeks ago, it definitely has some bugs when used with FF2.0

By: opl

opl — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:42:32 +0000

On one hand, thousands of people do not have a single problem with this extension. On the other hand, your code only works when disabling Firebug.

From that, it’s impossible to determine whether the problem is due to the extension or to a bad code.

By: Vladimir Cvetic

Vladimir Cvetic — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:37:49 +0000

I am sorry but it looks like you didn’t read post very well. After disabling Firebug problem was gone and people with no firebug installed did not have the problem.

By: SchizoDuckie

SchizoDuckie — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:07:16 +0000

You should probably just write better code. Firebug does not do anything weird with thousands of people, so don’t just blame firebug without having found the real problem.