As a user of both Firebug and IE's Devtoolbar I can state this is simply not true.
While I agree that IE's devtools had more features regarding xpath integration, you'll also had the problem that it was based on libxml (yes, the reason trident was exploitable for decades, and probably still is).
IE's devtools didn't have access to the DOM and only had access to the HTML/SGML/actually XML representation _before_ it was parsed into the DOM.
This gave you hundreds of error scenarios where debugging user events was simply impossible if they caused the DOM to change, something like adding a node or debugging a parentNode was impossible in trident.
And oh how often have I seen bugs in websites that were relying on specified flow roots that behaved differently in trident. Something like an unclosed <p> in the wrong place could easily mess up everything in trident and switch it to quirks mode.
Remember IE was exploitable via a parentNode.remove(parentNode), too? The hooks for devtools was the underlying reason.
I am not sure why you claim that IE had superior devtools experience. You must have done a lot of ActiveX related development, because everything else was impossible to debug in my opinion.
The best thing MS did was to create the Edge team that tried to refactor trident, and soon realized that it's impossible and instead started over from scratch.
While I agree that IE's devtools had more features regarding xpath integration, you'll also had the problem that it was based on libxml (yes, the reason trident was exploitable for decades, and probably still is).
IE's devtools didn't have access to the DOM and only had access to the HTML/SGML/actually XML representation _before_ it was parsed into the DOM.
This gave you hundreds of error scenarios where debugging user events was simply impossible if they caused the DOM to change, something like adding a node or debugging a parentNode was impossible in trident.
And oh how often have I seen bugs in websites that were relying on specified flow roots that behaved differently in trident. Something like an unclosed <p> in the wrong place could easily mess up everything in trident and switch it to quirks mode.
Remember IE was exploitable via a parentNode.remove(parentNode), too? The hooks for devtools was the underlying reason.
I am not sure why you claim that IE had superior devtools experience. You must have done a lot of ActiveX related development, because everything else was impossible to debug in my opinion.
The best thing MS did was to create the Edge team that tried to refactor trident, and soon realized that it's impossible and instead started over from scratch.