In Case of Stairs

The first feature complete beta for Firediff 1.0 has just landed here. This release allows for customization of the format saved by the save snapshot and diff features. Also included are some minor bug fixes and official support for Firefox 3.6 and Firebug 1.5.

This release has also been registered on Babelzilla (along with Firefocus) and any translators are welcome to provide their input.

Bugs may be filed with the fbug issue tracker.

Firediff recently hit a major milestone, with the implementation of major portions of the save snapshot and save diff features. These as well as the revert and search features are available in the most recent alpha.

As a somewhat preemptive warning, the save diff feature is not likely to generate a line for line match that can be applied directly to the source files. This is due a number of reasons, including performance optimizations in Firefox that cull information that is not vital to the final rendering of the page and the large number of coding styles that exist in the wild.

We are currently investigating the options that we have to improve this, although the current iteration should be treated as a  a serialized version of the page state that the designer or developer can use to manually update the source files, rather than something that can be automatically applied to the source using patch or another method.

Feel free to comment on this post or email me at kpdecker AT gmail.com with any input on these features or any of the other Firediff features.

Due an a conflict between one of the libraries used by Firediff and just about everything else, I have pushed the Firediff release schedule forward some and rolled a 0.2.1 release.

This release includes fixes for the extension conflict, a new text diffing algorithm that will hopefully give better results as well as provide the basis of the unified diff feature that is planned for 0.1, and a few minor bug fixes to the Snapshot UI.

Thank you to all of those who notified me of this conflict.

CSS Snapshot

After 3 months of development the latest release of Firediff is ready for distribution.

The release includes

• Snapshots: Display the changes made to the DOM or CSS at any point in time
• Support for the new Firebug Insert/Remove CSS rule functionality
• Various bug fixes from the 0.1 release

The updated extension may be found here as well as through Firefox’s auto-update mechanism (for those currently running Firediff 0.1a2)

As always any issues may be reported on the Firebug issue tracker.

The release of the initial version of Firediff brought quite a bit of input in terms of changes that can be made to the app. Due to this, I have decided to release another version from the 0.1 branch, 0.1a2. This is release is a bug fix release and does not include any of the extended functionality that is targeted for the 0.2 branch.

Changes:
- Display an error message when Firediff is installed on top of Firebug 1.3
- Modified Firebug HTML editor handling to improve Firebug source tracking
- Fixed CSS editor merge logic
- Provide failover case for XPath generation on “unknown” node types
- Extension update registration

This is again located here

Many thanks to Ajaxian for the bump yesterday.

A few people have reported issues with downloading the extension due to MIME types. Rather than trying to force WordPress to handle non-media files, I have moved the release location here. Future releases will be available at this location as well.

A few other issues within the code have been identified that are targeted at the 0.1 codeline. These are currently being examined and a new 0.1 branch release will likely be created in the next few days.

I’m pleased to announce that the initial version of Firediff is now available.

Firediff is a Firebug extension whose goal is to provide additional insight into the changes that are being made to the components of the page. As a 0.1 release this is effectively a preview of the final goals of the project. Many of the end goals such as diff generation, undo/redo functionality, and change persistence are still in the infancy.

Firediff currently requires a recent build of Firebug, with a strict requirement of at least version 1.4.

Many thanks to John J. Barton, Jan Odvarko and the rest of the Firebug community for assistance and input on this project.