I find they are all lacking in major ways and I have to jump between IE, FireFox, and Chrome. Anyone that swears by a single browser's dev tools isn't making much use of them.
- Only Chrome lets you set a breakpoint on JS event listeners.
- Only IE let's you change the next line of execution in JS.
- You *can't* edit the value of a local variable in the Chrome console!
- Only IE9 & FF search multiple JS files when doing a text find.
- IE doesn't refresh the dev tools representation of the DOM without clicking refresh.
- Only IE has a "format JavaScript" for minimized, obfuscated JS. And it allows you to set breakpoints on the formatted lines!
- Only Chrome has tools for finding memory leaks (see dev channel for big improvements in that).
Minor quibble. The latest versions of chrome(12 onwards) let you de-obfuscate JS code, and set breakpoints in the cleaned up code. Just right click in the source tab pane, and the code get prettified.
Only IE (so far) has lied horribly to me in its debugger: http://cl.ly/012t192A2s3Y1A3b3j3H . How in the world does that happen? For the record, `FireEvent` doesn't exist, but `fireEvent` does.
And then there's the worthless "{...}" object display from the Javascript console...
The horrible "{...}" output for almost everything (and proper callstacks when using named function expressions) are all fixed in IE9. That still puts it dead last for MOST visualizations behind all the other browsers OTHER than IE8, but some things, such as the profiler call tree, are still the best.
