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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

I welcome the changes to the CSS tools in particular! While the Inspector is full featured and offers some capabilities not found in Firebug, Firebug still feels more natural and reliable to me. The change to show unfiltered CSS rules is really helpful.

It's odd that Mozilla hasn't officially adopted Firebug as part of Firefox. While Firebug continues to improve, and the Firebug team does a great job, with Google is focusing on this area I suppose at some point I will prefer the Chrome inspector. Why is Firebug still a plugin?

On the darker side of web development, IE's development tools are typically lacking. Does anyone know whether they have been improved in IE 9?

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Because less than 0.1% of Firefox's users would ever need Firebug. Unlike Chrome, which is built on top of WebKit and therefore naturally inherits its built-in Developer Tools, Firefox was designed to be lean and focused unlike its notoriously bloated lets-include-everything predecessor. Being a clean, simple browser and leveraging the extension system for customization is the biggest strength of Firefox.

Yeah, it's overlooked by many that the Chrome isn't all that extensible compared to what you can do in Firefox with addons. Chrome's developer tools are built in because they must be, whereas Firebug should be able to do anything that Firefox does natively (though I think it may be mostly Javascript now).

maybe what's he's trying to say it's it should be included with the default installation, but not activated.

There's no point in adding however many MB of download for an add-on that so few people use.

It's 1.1 mb, which works out to less than five seconds for most people. I suppose they do leave it out to keep FF more lean, but that doesn't mean it Mozilla can't have an official web development add on.

1.1mb multiplied by the number of downloads of Firefox divided by the proportion of people that will use them? I don't think that that sounds like very good value...

Not to mention that any developer worth his or her salt already knows to install Firebug, and everyone else doesn't need to.

Chrome style incremental updates would help here. Firefox makes people download the entire browser package each time there's an update, while Chrome downloads a patch - a saving of >90% size-wise.

also it must be easier to upgrade just the add-on instead of the whole browser

I've actually gotten to quite like the dev tools in Chrome/Safari. I started using them because I was using Chrome anyways.

Editing CSS in Chrome is still more cumbersome, but otherwise I think it's pretty great, especially the timeline and network views.

I haven't tried the IE9 tools extensively but I did notice that evaluating a JS object in the JS REPL will now let you see the structure of that object as in Chrome, not just display "{Object}" as it did in IE8. That was probably my biggest gripe with the IE8 tools.

1. If it was part of trunk, you'd have to wait longer for new updates. As it is, Firebug can push updates without waiting on Firefox updates. 2. The Firebug developers and core mozilla developers overlap a lot. There is work done in trunk that complements Firebug. So it's has plenty of official blessing. 3. There isn't any performance advantage to putting it in trunk. Extensions in mozilla are first class citizens. 4. It would probably confuse ordinary users.

I can't recall the tools in releases prior to 9 as I've been using the betas and RC for some time now, but they're actually not that bad.

Firebug and the Chrome developer tools beat them easily, but they have improved.

They are adequate in IE8, but that's about all. The IE8 Dev Tools have some useful features (like easy cache clearing), but it doesn't seem like Microsoft had made much of an effort to make them user friendly or complete.

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