Lead Firebug Developer Moved to Google Chrome Team

The lead programmer of the Firebug Working Group, John Barton, said that from Monday he was starting to develop WebDev of a new generation as part of the Chrome browser team. From that day on, he will no longer participate in the support and refinement of the Firebug extension for Firefox.

John says it was hard to take this step, given the enormous impact Firebug has had on the Web in recent years. But now all browsers have (or will soon have) their own debuggers, and making next-generation Firebug-based tools is impractical: “the speed of browser changes was too great for our small team”, and Firebug itself had to compete with other similar tools for Firefox. In addition, “switching from a desktop to a mobile version and from one high-tech browser (Firefox) to three or more requires additional efforts from developers” and Barton had to rely on the additional “sponsorship” resources of his former employer IBM. At Google, of course, it’s easier to work.

In the new location, John Barton will first deal with the completion of the QueryPoint debugger, and then the situation. There is a plan to get someone from the Firebug team to port remote debugging protocol to Chrome.