Wink Saville’s Blog

That worked beautifully, I wanted to set a break point
on the first line of my code that executed after it loaded.
I ran:

firefox -chrome chrome://venkman/content

and then did “window.open()” my code loaded and I
set a future breakpoint on the first statement in the file.
I then checked “Save Break/Watch Settings On Exit” in
the file menu and then exited firefox.
I’d like to thank Alex Vincent for solving the mystry on how to debug a the initialization/loading of a Firefox extension. Earlier I had a problem concerning why my Firefox extension would not work on the Mac. My attempts to debug that led me to want to use a debugger to watch how my extension worked as it was loaded, but I couldn’t figure out a solution. So I posted a message to the Mozilla developer forums javaScript Debugger email list.

The solution was provided by Alex Vincent, which was to not use the -venkman option but instead execute using -chrome below is the last message I posted this subject which details the solution:

That worked beautifully, I wanted to set a break point
on the first line of my code that executed after it loaded,
so I ran:

firefox -chrome chrome://venkman/content

and then executed “window.open()” as you suggested.
My code loaded and I set a future breakpoint on the
first statement in the file. I then checked
“Save Break/Watch Settings On Exit” in
the file menu and then exited firefox.

I then ran a second time with the same command:

firefox -chrome chrome://venkman/content

Then did “window.open()” a second time and we dropped
back into the debugger at my break point at the top of
the file. This was exactly what I wanted.

This is exactly what I wanted, hopefully this helps
someone else in the future.

THANKS Alex!

Wink