Firebug finding things when searching in the html tab, but not in the script or net tabs

I'm trying to search for some text output somewhere random in the response. Searching in the html tab definitely finds the stuff I'm looking for, however searching in the script and net tabs yields nothing. This is very confusing to me, since the script and net tabs should be supersets of what is available in the html tab. Is my understanding not correct? I find it incredibly frustrating when searching the script tab seems so flaky and refuses to find things I know are 开发者_如何学JAVAthere.

So note that I'm simply print_r'ing some object in PHP, and I know where it is showing up in the dom. Also, barring a bizarre tear-in-the-fabric-of-spacetime level javascript/php oddity, I'm 100% confident that the dom isn't being populated by some weird cryptic javascript.

Another note: I'm searching in a flash facebook app, so theres a bunch of nested iframes and complications going on. Not sure if this makes a difference (I would hope it wouldn't anyways).

So my basic question is: whats the difference between searching in the html, script, and net tabs?

This is very confusing to me, since the script and net tabs should be supersets of what is available in the html tab. Is my understanding not correct?

Well, your first understanding was incorrect, but your suspicion that it was incorrect was, in fact, correct. ;)

The search bar means different things when you're in each of those tabs. The search bar only searches the top-level objects in whatever pane you're in. So, when you're in the Net tab, the search bar is searching only the key info on fetched files. When you're on the Script tab, it's only searching within DOM elements and files that are (or might be) scripts.

Here, I'll use this page (yeah, literally this one) to demonstrate.

1. Start the Firebug window and reload the page.

2. Switch to the Net tab and select All (next to Clear and Persist). In the search bar, start typing jquery.min.js and you'll see it start highlighting the line GET jquery.min.js sourced from ajax.googleapis.com. Those top level lines are all that are being searched when you're on the Net tab. That's it's job; to help you find information about fetched files quickly, so anything else is extraneous.

3. Likewise with the Script tab. If you search for function bQ, you'll quickly find it in jquery.min.js, but it won't bother searching plain HTML content because you're on the Script tab.

Does that help?