Keen in mind that Firefox 8 (and 7, and I think earlier versions) has Web Developer tools built in, obviating much of the need for Firebug.
The web console is not a replacement for firebug. its just decent built in tools.
Firebug - guess what - supports Firefox 7 and probably 8 too. And of course, Firefox 5 as well which is the latest release of Firefox btw.
It's tiring to read the large amount of FUD against Firefox lately. People like you are the major regression to the interwebs. Very seriously.
Today I needed to determine if any resources were 404ing on a page. Yesterday I wanted to see the exact POST request my browser was sending. I did both on FF using the inbuilt developer tools. I'm sure they may not replace every piece of Firebug functionality, but I didn't say they did.
> People like you are the major regression to the interwebs. Very seriously.
I've flagged your post. Please read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Given that Nightly is the least stable kind of build and could have other problems along the way, we've reached a pretty good point with Firebug's compatibility.
Of course, you also have the Web Console if you're having trouble with Firebug (and I'll grant that this alone is not a replacement for Firebug!)
ObDisclaimer: I'm the product manager for devtools at Mozilla.
I do a lot of Firefox extension development. Many companies or users have a need for highly specialized functionality built into a browser, and Firefox provides an very rich platform for that. You can easily build powerful applications that integrate tightly with Firefox.
Chrome's extension capability is much lighter and more restricted; Chrome extensions are just light little packets of functionality that add to the browser. There's many things that you can't do that you could do in Firefox.
I think that area is definitely where Firefox wins, and will probably continue winning in the future.
Does everyone need that, and is it enough to keep a large market share? I don't know...but it is something that Firefox does better.
They abandoned XULRunner and Gecko as independent platforms. They're committing to breaking every traditional extension every 6 weeks with the new release cycle (and told institutional users to go fuck themselves). The new stable extension APIs will be limited just like Chrome.
Companies will just switch to modern IE, Iceweasel, or Safari to get a maintained shelf-stable browser. Everyone else will use Chrome.
I don't have much experience with the new extension SDK, so I can't comment on it authoritatively. The old system is not without problems, and I'm actually glad that they are moving over to something closer to Chrome in terms of certain things...
These are just a few things Google has copied from Mozilla. I don't go around complaining about all the thing Google has copied from Mozilla, but the record has to be set straight, Mozilla is not following Google, they are going there own way. They implemented sandboxed Flash first and compartments which Chrome is missing.
Funny that Google haven't updated the Google toolbar.
"It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a big company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is analogous to the writing of "literary theorists." Most don't try to be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay." - Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
http://ostatic.com/blog/early-glimpse-of-firefox-8-shows-vas...