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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

i'm concerned about this as well, but i'm fine letting Chrome function simply as a dev tool and actually browse with Firefox, Opera, Servo, etc. w/uBlock Origin & uMatrix

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Firefox has some pretty nice dev tool extensions.

It won't for long when they deprecate their extension API and move to Chromes...

The dev tools are built into Firefox by default. So what do you base your claim on?

pretty sure he was talking about the extensions that extend them though. firebug comes to mind.

Firefox DevTools was built from Firebug, which is why they no longer develop Firebug. See the Firebug website: http://getfirebug.com/

And here's some more history: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefo...

No, Firefox Dev Tools is a completely seperate project historically. Firebug version 3 and up built on top of it, but that’s the only connection (beyond commonality in tool function).

They're sadly moving towards interoperability/feature-parity with WebExtensions, but I don't think they'll change entirely at any point.

I think they've explicitly stated that they're planning to entirely remove XUL from the codebase, eventually.

Presumably that won't mean that Firefox will only install extensions from the Chrome Web Store, though. addons.mozilla.org will continue to exist.

> i'm fine letting Chrome function simply as a dev tool and actually browse with Firefox, Opera, Servo, etc. w/uBlock Origin & uMatrix

I'm definitely in the same boat. That makes me wonder if it would be a bad long-term move for Chrome. Just guessing here based on personal anecdata, developers are more likely to use ad blockers, which could alienate the developer community. If that's true, I wonder if we would see a resurgence in Firefox and other browsers.

Firefox needs to improve its dev tools first. I love Firefox as a browser but I find myself forced to use chromium devtools because I can't figure out how to get our source maps to work with Firefox :(

This is going to get a whole lot better. Try nightly now to see what's coming.

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