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How to fix Firebug not allowing you to live edit your CSS

Posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 under firefox by Dustin Brewer.

I use Firebug constantly to easily edit a website’s CSS so I can fine tune a design or make adjustments, so when it stopped working, so did I. Everytime I would try to live-edit a site’s CSS it would give me “Failed to load source for: “. I tweeted about it a bit and got a few suggestions, but none of them fixed my problem. So, I decided I would Google it and through extensive searching and endless reading the best suggestion I could find was to uninstall Firefox, delete my preferences and basically start over. Which sounded like a horrible idea, so I made do with Firebug not working for awhile.

Like many other web designers and web developer I frequently disable cache so I’m sure my updates on a website are showing and don’t have to command+shift refresh to make sure my changes did or did not work correctly. It probably took a few days but that was when I had the epiphany of how Firebug probably pulled the CSS, rather than downloading the CSS each time it probably pulled from the most recently cached version. Therefore, with the web developers disable cache function it was effectively disabling my ability to pull and edit the CSS live. Turning off that feature fixed my problem with Firebug and made me wonder how many others had following the other advice I had found and gone to the trouble of uninstalling their Firefox and starting over.

Anyway, posting this to hopefully save someone else the trouble. I missed my Firebug.

Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “How to fix Firebug not allowing you to live edit your CSS”

1. Anonymous says:

   October 2, 2009 at 3:05 am

   I haven’t encountered this problem yet, but maybe it’s because I’m using firebug on my local webserver. Thanks for the info though, I’ll remember this if I ever run into the same problem.
2. Fixing Firebug To Edit CSS Within Firefox - aComment.net says:

   October 2, 2009 at 9:28 am

   [...] Comments [...]
3. papa says:

   November 15, 2009 at 5:09 pm

   hmmm… i have this exact same problem, however my cache is enabled and problem persists. really annoying actually.
4. Fixing Firebug To Edit CSS Within Firefox | DevWebPro says:

   December 16, 2009 at 3:48 pm

   [...] Comments [...]
5. Val says:

   October 6, 2010 at 4:53 am

   Thanks that fixed it for me!
6. Jazz says:

   October 24, 2010 at 10:09 pm

   Yup, that did the trick for me. I actually had to restart firefox or it still wouldn’t work.

   Thanks.