I've heard that Firebug has a new maintainer, and has a very large and complicated code base - which has led to many bugs in the new release.

Unfortunately there is no good alternative to Firebug, since it's been so great for so long no one has felt the need to make a compelling rival.

For the current project I'm working on, which is heavily JS based: console rarely works (evaling code snippets, console.log, etc).

It also always shows the message: 'reload to enable console', which never works. On my previous project it throws random buggy errors on every XMLHttpRequest.

The final thing which appears to be by design, is that you cannot see Net requests while its minimized, which is frustrating but I'd live with that if the other bugs were fixed.