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48 reviews for this add-on
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
Although this was not the greatest debugger I have ever used, this is the only one I could use in SeaMonkey.
Please release source code to the public.
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
My developer son says this is OK!
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
Could someone explain why the toolbar icon for this extension is 7 icons wide?
Thanks
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
I used to use ChromeBug to debug for addons, but it only works with FF5 and lower. Venkman is no longer updated but it still works with FF13.0a2 as I tested. There's some quirks when using it to debug, and its UI is not as well designed as ChromeBug (heck, even the webkit's Developer Tools is inferior to Fire/ChromeBug's UI), so if you only debug JS on webpages, use Firebug instead.
For addon debug though, Venkman still works with the latest FF and helps a lot. Thank you very much! Saves me quite some time.
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
The Venkman distribution available from this page does not work with Firefox 4.01. However, Venkman has been updated to work with Firefox 4.01 and an updated Venkman distribution is included in Sea Monkey nightly releases.
This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.9.88.1).Rated 4 out of 5 stars
Sorry guys, I suspect there will be no more updates, see here:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/weirdal/archives/020974.html
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
I hope they're planning on updating their debugger for the current release of Firefox!
Come on! Did Firefox change THAT much? How long till you get with the times?
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
where is venkman when i need one? 4.0!
This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.9.88.1).Rated 5 out of 5 stars
i depend on the Venkman jscript debugger so much i may be forced to go back to an earlier version of firefox.
any idea when the 4.0 might be available?
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
Okay it's complicated, buggy and feels like it gets broken by every release of Firefox, but it's very full featured. Be aware that 0.9.88.1 doesn't work on 4.0 final release despite being listed as compatible here. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=642182
This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.9.88.1).Rated 2 out of 5 stars
I want to debug a page,And I set one page as the evalution object,But when I press the "stop" the active page in the browser doesn't highlight.Instead the highlight action has been done in the so called venkman.xul .Why do this error can happen .I have other debugging plug-ins including fierbug. I like this tool even it's debugging capabilities are substabtial.
This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.9.88.1).Rated 5 out of 5 stars
version 0.9.88.1 fixes the problem with Fx 4.0b4pre, thanks!
venkman is still far superior to chromebug.
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
That´s what I need! Thanks!
This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.9.87.4).Rated 3 out of 5 stars
first, regarding those comments about venkman being difficult to learn: the help files are reference documents, not tutorials. to learn how to use venkman, google "venkman tutorial". the first one listed got me up and running venkman quickly without problem.
second, as soon as i tried to "stop" scripts with venkman, i had trouble with firefox freezing until i clicked continue with venkman. i uninstalled firebug and restarted ff but the problem persisted.
i have other debugging plug-ins including flashtracer and web developer that may be part or all the problem but i wasn't willing to uninstall those even if venkman would work well afterwards.
so, i uninstalled venkman, reinstalled firebug and started learning the javascript debugging capabilities of firebug. and they are substantial.
i would recommend anyone having trouble with venkman take a look at firebug. it does much more than help with javascript debugging but in that one area alone it allows break points, conditional break points, automatic error break points, line-by-line code execution, variable inspection, call stack inspection and more.
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
Works quite well for me (in Firefox 3.6 and TB 3.0.4). Sometimes I wish the save breakpoints / save watch / window layout settings would be a little more persistent, and also some easier UI driven settings for window sets (instead of having to look up the command line syntax), but all in all a useful tool. Drag and drop for watch expressions would be awesome!
Beats looking up the error console by far!
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
I'm know a lot of programming languages and also a lot of debuggers, including IE's. And while this one may not be completely useless or unusable, it's certainly and BY FAR the worst one I ever saw. It's unintuitive, unergonomic and buggy (and I haven't Firebug installed during testing this). So I rate this 1 star: Bad.
For example, one pop-up item for a file entry in a list says: "Find URL", and this just opens the file in the source code section. Why not just calling this "Open URL" as usual in 99% of all the software in the world!!!??? I firstly thought this would open some search dialogue and thus didn't click it. I needed to read a tutorial to learn what this does.
Especially this tool is rather useless for debugging Chrome URLs. For this purpose you have to switch of the "Exclude browser files" option. But then--besides the few JS file of yours you ACTUALLY want to get debugged--all the uninteresting browser background files are debugged simultaneously.
Every mouse move you do within the browser area may trigger the debugger. Sometimes, you cannot even reach the reload button to reload the URL you really want to debug. I tried to disable debugging of all the other files MANUALLY by selecting each of them and switching their debugging off. But then, although my files were NOT switched off, they are not debugged any longer. I couldn't get them to be debugged either. Instead some of the files for which I explicitly DISABLED debug automatically RE-ENABLE their debugging again, triggering the debugger again for errors I'm completely uninterested in and popping these files up in the source code section, disturbing my view. And not enough, the debugger by itself also CLOSES(!) my files within the source code section without any reason or request from me. I had to reopen but any breakpoint got LOST!
Lastly, I have to agree to what someone wrote here earlier: "However I haven't been able to do a simple set-a-breakpoint->run->step-trough-code use case." (ciacob on August 1, 2009)
Moreover, when I finally got the debugger to stop at a breakpoint, there's been no obvious way to make the script just run from there to the next encounter of a breakpoint. You have to "step" instead to "run". Maybe there is a way, but it's really not obvious. When I pressed e.g. "Step over", the debugger stepped into the file "browser.xml" (which also popped up in the source code section), although it was EXPLICITLY marked in the "Loaded Scripts" section as not-to-be-debugged!!! If I instead clicked "Continue" I would never see my breakpoint again, since from then the script is run without regard to any breakpoint it contains. Thus, there is for example no way for observing a breakpoint within a for-loop for every cycle of the loop, except (MAYBE, but I don't see how) by stepping each line in the for-loop for each cycle of the loop.
I see from the other reviews that many people find this tool useful. I cannot understand why and I really cannot recommend this piece of software. Moreover, I explicitly recommend NOT to install it, if you want it for the debugging of scripts of Chrome URLs. Unfortunately, you'll have to use alert-boxes to debug these scripts.
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
great job!!!
This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.9.87.4).Rated 3 out of 5 stars
Incredibly useful, but has a terrible UI and is very buggy. If you need a debugger, this is the thing to use, but it's by no means perfect.
This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.9.87.4).Rated 5 out of 5 stars
I've been using Venkman for more than five years for all of my JavaScript and extension development, across several machines and operating systems. It's the perfect tool for the job, I have no idea what other reviewers are complaining about.
This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.9.87.4).Rated 1 out of 5 stars
I am a software developer and I gotta say: Even IE's builtin Javascript Debugger is better than this one.
I consider it unergonomic and nearly unuseable.
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