Man, it was 2006 (10 years ago!) when Firebug, Drosera [1] and Web Inspector [2] were all released. There were definitely a lot of people eager to have some tools to make front end web dev easier back then.

I never worked with Venkman but I recall all too well the hellish time I had debugging JS back around the turn of the millennium. IE was laughable, if there was an error in a script somewhere it would often just say error on line -1.

[1] https://webkit.org/blog/61/introducing-drosera/ [2] https://webkit.org/blog/41/introducing-the-web-inspector/

That part about the line numbers in IE error messages was exactly the pain I was thinking of :)