Back in the day, you would hear often something along the lines of "Chrome is good, but I keep coming back to Firefox because of Firebug". Fast forward to today and debugging with Firebug feels clumsy and sluggish whenever there's something Firefox specific to debug (no offense to the devs of firebug, if it wasn't because of them the chrome dev tools wouldn't exist; it's just lagging a bit behind nowadays)

Wow- I have to say I disagree. For serious debug work I go to firebug. Chrome seems clunky- and I can never find what I'm looking for. Maybe depends on what you're used to.

Try getting used to Chrome, I assure you you won't look back after a while. The event timeline for instance is one thing completely absent in firebug and invaluable to debug client performance.

I was literally just thinking, after reading the comments on the post about hot-swapping in Chrome's editor [1], that this seemed like the next step.

I like it. Obviously, I don't expect (or want) Chrome to replace my text editor any time soon, but this will be great for quick fixes.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5197695

Does it work with the hot-swapping stuff? I've set it up as per the instructions (I thiiiink...) - and now I can edit files in the console and they are saved to the file system: but I've lost the magical beautiful hot-swapping!

I will again play the grumpy old guy, but this seems like building Eclipse into the JVM.

Firebug/Devtools are obviously ridiculously awesome. For debugging layout, there will never be anything as good as "Inspect element".

But for programming, I want to write/debug in my IDE, and poke the browser via a standardized wire protocol that IE/FF/Chrome/Opera all support.

Not to say they shouldn't be working on this; if this is the workflow you like, that's awesome. I just hope wire protocols get some love too.

With the amazing collective effort going into browsers, hopefully I don't have anything to worry about.

Wire protocols are already here: WebDriver wire protocol: http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-webdriver-20130117/

Firefox "marionette" automates (controls) firefox via the WebDriver API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Marionette

Chrome also has an "automation proxy" API that is used by ChromeDriver. http://code.google.com/p/chromedriver/

Yes! I actually wondered if this is where they'll go, asked if there is a way to do it on programmers.SE and posted it here [1] (question got closed, should have been an SO question probably). so I'm not that crazy after all. getting hot swapping and contextual real-time auto completion is really a productivity boost.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5115930

I think that one of the big advantages to building it into chrome is that you get better window management capabilities. OS X is utterly horrible at managing windows without using the mouse, having everything built into the same app often gives more control.

Web driver approaches would work much better if there were sane ways to control where the new window pops up. Even on Linux with X Monad or stumpwm, the communication/protocol for the location of new windows popping up is difficult to impossible.

I think Livereload is actually kinda similar.

I think it would be great if Google Chrome had an API that allowed any editor to push updates to the browser.

This excites me. Once we have html, LESS and SASS editing my front-end dev work won't be the same again. Brilliant.

downloads canary immediately

No, it's not hard to "arrange" windows. We have tiling window managers for that.

Chrome Workflow + Sublime Text 2 = Puuuurrrfect!