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Comment by mmuro | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how Mozilla came to the conclusion that their Web inspector is actually usable.

The HTML doesn't appear when inspecting (no, that takes an extra click). The CSS appears in an extra vertical sidebar taking up even more room on the screen. You can't add a Console button, but 3D View is worthy?

I love Firefox, but this it's just plain odd they didn't integrate Firebug into core.

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Two things:

1) The Firebug team had their own priorities, development timeframes, and goals, and wasn't interested in being integrated in the core, exactly.

2) The Firebug code is .... not easy to work with. Actually trying to make any sort of significant changes to it without introducing some serious problems is pretty hard.

I totally understand it's way easier to start from scratch. It's a little disappointing to hear that the Firebug team didn't want to play ball.

It's not a big deal and I can continue to use Firebug, but the UI decisions still baffle me. Safari and Chrome display the HTML (which 90% of the time is what I'm after to begin with anyways) upon inspection with the CSS on the side. Being able to turn these off would be fine by me, but don't make me opt in every single time. Also, having the Console and other browser inspections would really take it to the next level.

Functionality notwithstanding, I really like the look and feel of it.

Please file bugs at bugzilla.mozilla.org! This kind of feedback is very beneficial. (Disclaimer: I don't work on the devtools, but I work at Mozilla)

That's a small tweak and shouldn't diminish the overall awesomeness that is the rest of the devtools. I actually agree with you, but have found them extremely fast and usable overall.

"Didn't want to play ball" has negative connotations that I certainly didn't mean to imply with what I said. It was just the priorities and goals that were different (e.g. back when JJB was still working on Firebug as part of his job at IBM Research, his work on Firebug needed to have a "research" component, as I understand, which led to some differences in approach from a pure "create a product" tack).

Just to reiterate what bz said for emphasis: it wasn't a matter of Firebug "playing ball". The choice to build afresh was made based on the direction that they wanted to go at the time and our own assessment of how we could get something reliable into the product.

Also, Firefox 13 (which enters beta this week) has a bunch of nice improvements including remembering whether the HTML and Style panels are open.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/firefox-aurora-13-developer...

We're iterating at a decent pace on these tools, so keep watching. The JavaScript debugger is coming to Aurora soon and it's shaping up quite nicely. The work behind that is going to be a big win for both the new debugger UI in Firefox and ultimately for Firebug as well.

In my Nightly (don't know about current release), I just have to click once on the show html button, and if I inspect another page later, it brings the HTML panel along.

I actually find the vertical CSS sidebar to be an excellent choice. CSS (and code in general) is an inherently vertical thing (short line length), whereas the number of rules displayed is maximized using a vertical panel. A console button would maybe be a good idea, but I only use the keyboard shortcuts, so I don't mind, this prevent reducing the visual clutter.

Firebug is a seriously old and not that sufficiently maintened code base, hence the choice to write new tools, more integrated with the browser.

I was under the impression that Firebug was being actively developed again. Is that not right? They had some really cool features that Webkit inspector did not last I tried it, which was fairly recently.

Yes, the style inspector is vertical for exactly the reason you cite. We're also working on a better solution so that it doesn't cause issues with responsive designs.

Firebug is still actively maintained and continues to have new releases and improvements. Firebug 1.10 (currently in alpha), for example, is now restartless and has less impact on page performance.

Completely agree. I've heard some people like it - I am struggling to see how it'd be useful, or have any benefits over firebug.

I'm not even sure why they're trying to create a Firebug replacement. Isn't this how we get browser bloat, by including every possible tool with the core browser?

What do you mean by "browser bloat"?

It isn't a replacement. It's a simple tool to take care of most quick tasks, leaving the heavy lifting to addons like Firebug.

It will remember that you last had the CSS/HTML windows open when you reopen them.

I like that it takes less screen space by default, given that most of my usage is just selecting and analysing the CSS. It's great on a Macbook air.

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