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Re:"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla by andruby on Thursday August 13, 2020 @12:26PM (#24145115)
The tool was firebug. It was a big difference when browsers didn’t offer built in tools.
Re:"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla by vosper on Thursday August 13, 2020 @02:46PM (#24146767)
When Firebug came out it was such a big deal that it was the sole reason our IE-only product (which was not a simple application, it was fully-fledged fleet management, tracking, mapping, and reporting platform, entirely web-based) got cross-browser compatibility (we made it work with Firefox).

Being able to use Firebug was such a huge boon to development back in the day, though it probably looks primitive today.

Re:"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla by irrational on Thursday August 13, 2020 @01:12PM (#24145654)
Firebug is what got me to use Firefox in the beginning. I continued to use Firefox out of habit after firebug went away, though the replacement was inferior (it still is). Now... I might have to switch to Chrome, but I really don’t want to due to privacy issues. I suppose I could use it just for development.
Re:"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla by hinkley on Thursday August 13, 2020 @02:48PM (#24146794)
I think Firebug got most of us to use Firefox, and then we got other people to use Firefox, directly or indirectly.

I worked on two teams back to back. Everyone was using Firebug. Management was telling us NOT to support Firefox, but tough shit, you want this work done yesterday and the only way that's going to happen is by engineering on Firefox/Firebug and then going back to black magic for the 10% that didn't work on IE (and soon, Safari).