FireBug in Chrome doesn't show up on local websites

Question

When I right-click on the local html page and select "Inspect with FireBug Lite" nothing happens... on regular online sites it works except for "https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps"

anyone had the same experience? I have the latest version of the extension (but it's from 2011 :/)

UPDATE: on some local sites it does show! on two web apps (PHP, Rails) it did work, but on a few static HTML files I tried it didn't....

Answer 1

Apparently this is normal...:

It doesn't work on local pages

If by "local pages" you mean files accessed via "file:///" protocol then yes, Firebug Lite doesn't work with "file:///" protocol. This is a JavaScript security restriction to prevent malicious web pages from accessing files in your your machine. Also, please note that the while you can load a "local page" in the browser (it will render properly) it will NOT behave exactly the same as when hosted in a web server.

Solution: You can solve this problem by loading your page in a web server installed in your machine, so you can access that local files through "http://" addresses. This is the best solution: it is safer, and you'll get the most of what Firebug Lite can give you. I recommend using Apache HTTP Server, but you can use anyone (like IIS for example).

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Which exact URL are you visiting? It is an internal Chrome's page (like "chrome://downloads/"), or some page related to Google Chrome extensions "https://chrome.google.com/extensions/")?

Google Chrome won't allow content scripts (required by Firebug Lite) running on such pages. The problem is that Chrome does not inform the user and neither the extension about it. In other words, there is no way to Firebug Lite know if the content script was loaded or not, and we worked around this by sniffing the URL and detecting when you visit URLs that begins with "chrome://" or "https://chrome.google.com/extensions/", alerting users in such cases.

Answer 2

You've few options to fix the solution.

One is to use Mozilla Firefox.

Second, install a web server on your system. Try WAMP or XAMPP. Once installed, store all the web pages in the root folder of the web server you just created. Save all the web pages and html files in C:\xampp\htdocs. Navigate to the locally stored webpages using your web browser by going to “127.0.0.1/index.html” or “localhost/index.html”.

Now you can use Firebug-Lite for Google Chrome on local files.