I have been a fan of JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA as an IDE for many years, and with WebStorm/PhpStorm (or IntelliJ with the JavaScript plugin) JetBrain really is on their way to having a great JavaScript IDE. What is particularly impressive is how WebStorm/PhpStorm is able to parse out meaning from untyped JS and have knowledge of many of the core JS libraries.

But one problem is that they don’t debug Firefox extensions. I often use ChromeBug for this, but sometimes it’s nice to debug right in the IDE. With a little bit of hacking I found a way to update their debugger so that it can also debug Firefox extensions.

You can get the code on GitHub at WebStorm-Firefox-Connector. I plan to update it with each update of the WebStorm Firefox extension until JetBrains adds this functionality themselves. I’ve submitted the changes to JetBrains as an issue in the hope that they will incorporate my changes into the main product.

To debug extensions with WebStorm/IntelliJ, do the following:

• Install WebStorm and let it install the Firefox debugger extension
• Determine what version of the Firefox debugger extension you are using (look in the Add-Ons tab)
• Download the correct branch from GitHub for your version to replace the contents of the firefox-connector@jetbrains.com directory.
• Edit the file extensions\firefox-connector@jetbrains.com\chrome\chromeFiles\content\scripts.js to add your chrome URL root to the variable enabledChromeComponents. For example, this allows me to debug an extension named myext:
  • ·         enabledChromeComponents: ["myext"]

Most folks won’t care, but it’s worth pointing out that you can’t use WebStorm to debug Firebug itself since they both use JSD, which only supports one debugger client at a time. JSD2 is supposed to fix this, but sometimes I wonder if JSD2 will ever really happen.

I do some work on Firebug, and I have looked a bit into creating a multi-layer-client wrapper for JSD, but haven’t had the time to get it actually working. Besides, the JSD layer is a bit tricky. Let’s just say I’ve gotten used to wishing JSD2 were on the horizon and knowing that it probably isn’t.

Update 2/14/11

They have updated the debugger extension (0.4.3) with a good chunk of my changes, but unfortunately not all of them. Looks like I’ll be updating the patched version of the debug extensions for at least a while longer. You can still find the any updates at GitHub.

Related articles

• Jet Brains tunes JavaScript IDE for Harmony (infoworld.com)