Tuesday 25 August 2009

Firebug and Hightlighter.js Problem returns

Code Highlighting Disabled with Firebug 1.4.2

The other month I wrote an article explaining how after upgrading to Firebug 1.4.0
all my code highlighting went haywire
with bits disappearing all over the place. I thought I had fixed the problem as the code highlighting has been working fine in FireFox for a couple of months now but I have recently upgraded to FireFox 3.5.2 and Firebug 1.4.2 and now the problem is back in a slightly different form.

Instead of the code I am trying to highlight disappearing or being broken the code appears but the highlighting just doesn't activate and the code stays uncoloured. There is an error on line 1 of the packed version of highlight.js and 101 of that version unpacked with my unpacker tool.

return [O.substr(0, r.index), r[0], false]

The error being:

Cannot access optimized closure

If I disable Firebug on the page or the whole add-on then the code highlighting will work in FireFox so it does seem to be an issue with Firebug clashing with the highlighter code in some way.

I have tried downloading the latest version of the highlighter 5.3 from Software Maniacs but it makes no difference.

The highlighting continues to work in other browsers IE, Chrome, Opera, Safari etc and it will work in FireFox when Firebug is disabled.

The last few versions of Firebug have been very buggy in terms of inspection and performance so maybe this is a known bug. I did post a bug at Mozilla last time and I also contacted Software Maniacs. Until this gets resolved I suggest if you really want code highlighting then to use another browser or disable Firebug.

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