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Comment by ep103 | Hacker News Reader

Still the best developer toolset, on any browser. Unarguably once its combined with FF native tools, and the webdevtoolbar.

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Can you explain why? I've never found a use case that it covers better than Chrome, and it seems to bloat FF a bit. But I'm very willing to believe I just don't understand what it offers.

One thing that I found indicative of the "depth" of Firebug is the very simple context menu item when you right-click a URL in the Network tab: "Copy as Curl command" (the text may read differently, this is from memory). It creates a clipboard entry which contains a "curl" command line with all the cookie/header/etc. data that would be sent from your browser if you were to request that URL (via Ajax or whatever). You paste that into your terminal and you can keep retrying indefinitely without having to click/interact with the web page at all. Hugely useful if you're debugging the server side of a client->server interaction.

Chrome dev tools has that too these days. Copy as curl.

these days == for years

ff 31: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Network_Monit...

Chrome and Firefox both have that.

Chrome dev tools lacks in the DOM view of firebug. Firebug makes it easy to search and identify all the DOM objects.

Chrome still does not support multiline JS console (you need to shift-enter every single lines)

See: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=35487

That is useful, but doesn't really seem to cover the original comment's assertion that Firebug is still "inarguably the best"

This seems more like a different preference than a bug.

I'm always surprised when I read comments about how the Firefox devtools offer the best developer experience. Every single one of these new features (except searching the dom via CSS selectors or regex) have been available in Safari's Web Inspector for OS X for at least a year. Plus, I think the UI is more thought out and easy to use in Safari. Can someone explain what Safari's Web Inspector is lacking?

Now that Chrome and Safari inspectors have started to diverge significantly I find the Chrome inspector far superior. It just feels like more time has been invested in it.

Only issue I have is the fact it changes more or less every release, leading to a day or so of re-learning how to do certain tasks.

Does Safari support source-maps yet?

Yes, Safari supports source maps (has for a while).

Can someone explain what Safari's Web Inspector is lacking?

It has a platform limitation.

Even as a Mac user, Safari completely has vanished from my radar. Apple seems too slow to adopt the latest web technologies and Safari to me is a completely lackluster browser. It has neither the market share of IE nor the raw speed of Chrome nor the versatility and configurability of Firefox.

Safari does not work on anything but MacOS and iOS, so developing for it requires additional testing.

It doesn't run on PCs.

Which is a shame. Apple should bring back Windows Safari.

Would be good to bring it back to Windows, so that we can test our web sites. However last time when I was using it on Windows it was making my hard drive to make strange noises. I think that it was using my hard disk constantly.

publicity.

I've met quite a few developers that really like the safari dev tools. If your not developing on mac though I don't know how good your experience is (and linux is a non starter)

I like the search feature in Firebug. Being able to search across all scripts/nodes/stylesheets is rad. Is Chrome Dev Tools' search that good yet? Every time I am working with another dev and want to search for a symbol, I tell the other devs to switch to Firefox/Firebug because Chrome Dev Tools is a mystery of hunting and pecking when it comes to search. (Google is not the best at something-something search??) I cannot understand why other devs are so happy with Chrome.

The Chrome timeline is rad when it comes to performance tuning, and maybe a lot of devs are light on the JS and heavy on the CSS. I jump into Chrome, briefly, whenever I want to tune performance.

All of the dev tools have quirks, bugs, and dumb UI usability issues, but when I want to work with a large codebase (which is every day of my life), I find Firebug works the best.

Chrome Dev Tools have had this for some time. On OSX Command-Option-F. Or, click the 'Search' tab in the console.

I haven't really found anything Firebug does that Chrome doesn't, and tons of stuff Chrome does that others don't, like debugging Web Workers, or awesome profiling tools for both JS CPU/HEAP, as well as internal browser profiling. Chrome Tracing is unparalleled.

Command-Option-F! I learn something new every day, thanks!

I've always gotten tripped up by the fact that Command-F pulls up a local file Find toolbar when I've focused a JavaScript source page. I assumed that was the extent of the Find capabilities Chrome offered. I'm 51% angry and 49% embarrassed that I never knew this! :)

Agreed the Web Workers debugger in Chrome is very advanced and as I recall they had that available straight away when the Web Workers feature was first released.

I think the Firefox/Firebug guys have only just added javascript console output for web workers in Firefox 30 and the debugger protocol for web workers is still in development.

I agree that Chrome's developer tool suite is more comprehensive than other browsers. For my day to day development tasks, looking at network calls, inspecting html and debugging CSS/JavaScript, Firefox+Firebug is still the most user friendly and accessible to me.

You can combine Firebug with the FF native developer tools? Like all-in-one in the Firebug UI?

I agree with you on webdevtoolbar, that is a fantastic tool for inspecting/altering aspects of the page. I wish webdevtoolbar had user agent tools. I have to run another plugin to give me user agent spoofing.

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