I agree that the Chrome inspector is missing some things that Firebug has (primarily, it is unable to render the HTML returned in XHR requests - this is a big deal for me, since I use Django which returns debug pages in HTML, and I do a ton of XHR in my applications) but I use it when I can simply because it hangs less, crashes less and is faster overall for me. You should know though that there's a Firebug Lite bookmarklet available for Chrome - that's what I use when I need to examine XHR responses. There's probably a plugin for it too.
Also how recently have you tried the Chrome inspector? It's been getting a lot of attention lately from the dev team.
Also how recently have you tried the Chrome inspector? It's been getting a lot of attention lately from the dev team.