Is there any reason for Firebug to continue existing as a plugin? I know it did a lot to further the front-end dev tools in all the browsers, but at this point the default dev tools in FF and Chrome are just as good and in many ways better.
Although Firebug has "fire" in the name, it is not an official Mozilla project. It's an independent group of developers (though naturally, many are Mozilla contributors). That independence is important, as competition always is! I can't speak for the developers who are working on it, Firebug will likely evolve to be a complementary set of tools to the built-in ones. Today provides valuable continuity for people who are used to using Firebug to build websites, and has a number of addons for Firebug itself that exists nowhere else on the web. Shutting it down would be a shame.
> We thought long and hard about including Firebug wholesale and considered several approaches to integrating it. An early prototype of the Inspector even included a significant portion of Firebug. Ultimately, integration proved to be too challenging and would have required rewrites that would have been equivalent to starting over.
Firebug can be really slow, but I just can't change it to Chrome dev tools, which seem unintuitive for me in many places (and which stop me on non-existing breakpoints randomly, no, I don't have "break on exceptions" enabled or anything like this).
Regarding Fx dev tools, they e.g. do not show evaled scripts at all in the JS panel. Also I don't see a way (yet) to have debugger and console visible at the same time. And there are many other tiny Firebug goodies not implemented yet here and there. Firebug will be still essential for me for many months.
Actually they address that as well, albeit from a philosophical standpoint -- Firebug is supposed to provide useful web development features that aren't already served by the browser. There isn't supposed to be competition.
I suppose, in the near future, some redundant features will be cut from Firebug.
Well, I find the FireQuery extension for Firebug (http://firequery.binaryage.com/) very useful. Though it could probably be ported to the native developer tools, it probably won’t be, at least for a while. So Firebug is useful for backwards-compatibility with custom extensions.
Firefox Dev Tools lacks several features that Firebug provides (editing) plus it has IMHO a slicker UI. I am glad that Firebug still is supported by some devs. Chrome Dev tools lacks several features too, that Firebug provides (vice versa), though Chrome Dev tools have a worse UI.
I hope Firefox Dev tools clone the best parts of Firebug and Chrome Tool.
