I develop exclusively in Firefox, and test on other browsers, so I use Firebug all the time. How well do other built-in tools compare to it?
* IE8's developer tools are a start, but they're slow, buggy and tend to crash a lot (either a soft-crash where some features suddenly stop working, or a hard crash where the inspector takes down the browser). I think they only implement `console.log`, and it only works when you have the tools open otherwise it generates an error
* Opera's Dragonfly... well I haven't tried it in a long time, though I mean to do it soon-ish: during last week's Opera "AMA" on reddit I was told good progress had been made.
These days I use Safari as my main development browser, and it's very enjoyable.
edit: addendum, there are also things simply done differently. For instance Firebug displays the ajax requests in the console, which is something I find spammy but you may like. On the other hand the Webkit dev tools not only have a dedicated console tab but you can access a JS console from any tool (by pressing [ESC] in Safari, don't know the chrome shortcut, might be the same, it will slide up a console to half-height in the manner of e.g. OSX's Visor) which is very handy, especially in the debugger.
I still use Firebug at work because I don't have Chrome there, but for home projects I've pretty much switched entirely.
It'll be interesting to see what happens to development tools when Firebug goes cross-browser.
Why? What difference do you see between the browsers debugging-wise?
Feature-wise, very little. But as I said - I do find I can work faster with Firebug - I much prefer the the DOM inspector (one click node editing, css editing, the fact that it live updates the DOM as it is changed via any JS running on the page) and the console (DOM/JS object inspection and having XHR logging in the console itself and not on another tab). Plugins such as FireQuery also make a difference for my needs.
Yes the Webkit DOM inspector lacks that.
> css editing
It does have that on the other hand.
> the fact that it live updates the DOM as it is changed via any JS running on the page
My DOM inspector does seem to do that as well, though it doesn't highlight the altered subtrees the way Firebug does.
> DOM/JS object inspection
Has been in for a long time, though it could be missing some bells and whistles.
> having XHR logging in the console itself and not on another tab
Matter of tastes there, we'll have to agree to disagree as I'm not fond of this at all.
> Plugins such as FireQuery also make a difference for my needs.
Yes that I will easily give you.
I know, but CSS editing is easier with Firebug.
> My DOM inspector does seem to do that as well, though it doesn't highlight the altered subtrees the way Firebug does.
Not nearly the in same way a Firebug does it, I find it very useful for the amount of DOM manipulation I do with JS.
> Has been in for a long time, though it could be missing some bells and whistles.
Again it's the "bells and whistles" that really make the difference for me some of the time. The less time it takes me to debug something, the better.
That said, I still use Chrome inspector on a daily basis, there's no fanboyism from my part.
Since you haven't described which bells and whistles you think are missing, I can't exactly agree with your position.
For some reason the WebKit request explorer doesn’t show cookie headers, for instance.
Mmm indeed, that's interesting, I'd never noticed. It shows the Set-Cookie response headers but not the Cookie request ones.