{"id":108,"date":"2008-11-26T09:12:52","date_gmt":"2008-11-26T14:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/26\/a-javascript-debugging-tip-for-firebug\/"},"modified":"2008-12-04T22:41:31","modified_gmt":"2008-12-05T03:41:31","slug":"a-javascript-debugging-tip-for-firebug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/26\/a-javascript-debugging-tip-for-firebug\/","title":{"rendered":"A Javascript debugging tip for Firebug (or “Stop using alert()!”)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you know that if you’ve got Firebug for Firefox installed, you can use it for debugging your own code? By calling<\/p>\n

console.log("Here's a message!");<\/pre>\n
Firebug will print the message to it’s internal message log. Neat!<\/p>\n
\"Firebug<\/p>\n
Now, that’s all good. But let’s say you’re on a project that’s not using a Javascript preprocessor to minify and strip debugging code — which would be the best option. You want the benefits of debugging, but not having to constantly remove debugging code for deployment. If a user doesn’t have Firebug installed, they won’t have a console object. So obviously leaving your debug code in is going to cause an error.<\/p>\n
Or will it?<\/p>\n
Try adding this code before any of your other Javascript. It will set up a fake console so that if Firebug is not installed, there won’t be any errors.<\/p>\n
if(!console || !console.log) {\r\nvar console = new Array();\r\nconsole.log = function () {}\r\n}<\/pre>\n
Bonus idea! If you combine the idea shown here, with my previous post about debugging Firefox extensions<\/a>, you can see how to prevent extension debugging from getting in the way of your users.<\/p>\n
if(!Firebug || !Firebug.Console || !Firebug.Console.log) {\r\nvar Firebug = new Array();\r\nFirebug.Console = new Array();\r\nFirebug.Console.log = function () {}\r\n}<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Did you know that if you’ve got Firebug for Firefox installed, you can use it for debugging your own code? By calling Firebug will print the message to it’s internal message log. Neat! Now, that’s all good. But let’s say you’re on a project that’s not using a Javascript preprocessor to minify and strip debugging … Continue reading “A Javascript debugging tip for Firebug (or “Stop using alert()!”)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145,236,88,123],"tags":[193,192,346,191,57,579],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timrosenblatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}