Not enough good things can be said about this. Joe Hewitt has released a public beta of Firebug 1.0 and announced that it will continue to be open source. Any donations he gets are well deserved. Firebug is amazing, and 1.0 just blows me away. It is an invaluable part of a web developer’s toolkit.

The network monitoring is a nice enough addition, because who doesn’t want to know more about how long files/pages take to download? But it goes one step further.

Firebug network monitor with image thumbnail

Hover over one of the lines to get not just the fully qualified URL for the request, but if the request is for an image, Firebug also displays any images requested, scaling them to thumbnails if necessary. A small touch that really makes a difference.

JavaScript debugging is better than ever. Conditional breakpoints (“break only if the variable has this value”), profiling… very nice indeed. HTML and CSS inspection and manipulation, Firebug Lite for using a Firebug console in browsers other thank Firefox… heaven.

I’m still putting it through its paces, but already the new version saved me a lot of time today during a big bug stomping session. Go get Firebug now.