Ash Searle’s Blog

Lots of people are unable to use the Style tab in the new Firebug beta. The Firebug FAQ leads to a thread suggesting this fix:

1. Uninstall Firefox
2. Delete the (left-over) install folder (e.g. C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox)
3. Reinstall Firefox using a custom install (to ensure the DOM Inspector is installed

Knowing that I already had the DOM Inspector installed, I thought I’d try removing just a few files, instead of the whole install folder. Whatever I did worked, and the Style tab works for me now. This more conservative procedure is:

1. Uninstall Firefox
2. Delete only the named inspector* in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components
3. Reinstall Firefox using a custom install (to ensure the DOM Inspector is installed

I’m not sure whether the uninstall and reinstall procedure is strictly necessary, so I’m hoping someone out there can try this:

1. Stop Firefox
2. Delete all files named inspector* in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components
3. Restart Firefox

Most JavaScript libraries include trivial implementations of Array’s push and pop methods to provide support for older browsers. However, literally every library’s implementation is flawed. While this is bad enough, I’ve also found that every browser’s implementation of push and pop contains bugs. These vary from browser to browser: Internet Explorer’s methods can’t be reused; Safari has type-conversion issues; and Firefox & Opera don’t truncate Arrays properly.

It’s been seven years since the publication of the official ECMAScript Language Specification, and I think we should expect a little more from our browsers. In this article, I’ve documented the current problems, and I show how to write library implementations conforming precisely to the language spec’. (more…)