De-selection Workaround In Firebug

Like most web designers / developers I use the Firebug addon for Firefox. It's a little bug on your status bar that lets you open a pane in the bottom of your browser window and inspect elements of the page you're on. It's fantastic for tracing where some part is getting it's style info from. I work with Drupal, Drupal themes often have multiple layers of CSS info. I've noticed recently that it deselects stuff when you mouse away, I've also found a workaround.

When you select an element on a page there's often a lot of info you have to scroll to see, you can't do that if it deselects as you move the pointer away. Firebug also lets you try live changes on the page which update on the fly through the magic of Javascript I believe. They don't stay on refresh, but it does let you test a look quickly, before applying the same change to the real CSS file.

If you select your element as usual, then right click to bring the menu up it seems to hold the selection, allowing you to move down into the Firebug pane and work as usual. When you click in there, the right click menu disappears as usual and Firebug acts as it's supposed to. It isn't a fix, it's a workaround, you have to do this with every new element change. It's annoying but it does at least make Firebug useful until it's fixed properly.

I am gradually exploring Chromium more these days, although Firefox 4 Beta is pretty nice, I like the UI changes. Firebug is one of the killer addons that I'll always need the features of in any browser that hopes to be my default browser. The more I get used to Drupal the less I need to use it, but when I do, it's to narrow down something I couldn't find before.