Hacker News Reader

Comment by eddieplan9 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com