I have seen this question a lot when Firebug vs. Developer Tools comes up ... for like years and years, since Developer Tools first dropped even. Now you've got me curious. Please reply with points I offer below that you HAVEN'T heard before.
1. Just make Find work right. I need global find, that's all I need. On what corporate drone planet is it a smart idea to prepend an exclamation mark to search terms to request a global find? Chrome makes the same mistake - The Search Company got Find wrong... (Perhaps Chrome ain't all that and a bag of chips!?)
MAKE CTRL-F DEFAULT TO GLOBAL FIND! [Scream your favorite cuss word now if you're with me on this!] One strike and you're out when you screw up something dead simple like Find!
I don't need file-catalogged search results where I stoke my chin and ponder all the matches; just go to each match by jumping around directly in the source, let me hold down Enter while you cycle through the matches and source files, let me know when we wrap around the search result list with a little informative "search results wrapped" pop-under - how do I describe my frustration?? FIND IS VERY UNPRODUCTIVE AND OVER-ENGINEERED IN DEVELOPER TOOLS. This is somebody's baby, I'm sorry to whomever if he is reading this - I just think simple is the key and that's what Firebug has going for it. Just do me a favor and toss the whole Find as you got it into an Advanced Find dialog box and give me simple, Firebug-style, rip n' roll global find in Developer Tools, PLEASE.
2. I know Firebug is an opt-in extension, so they have the right to do this, but ... Firebug puts that handy bug icon on the location bar for popping open the firebug panel. It's nice, appeals to my lazy muscle memory! I'm sure the Firefox Developer Edition does something similar (right??), and they wouldn't force me to go rummage the hamburger menu for their link in that version of Firefox. But, I'm too unmotivated to switch to that version of Firefox. I'm far too unmotivated to customize my location bar (except to remove the new Pocket icon, gross.) The firebug icon is beautiful, I want to click its button.
3. I like the tabs in firebug better than those in developer tools. The CSS inspector is great in Firebug, always has been very productive.
4. Breakpoints are hinky in Firefox in general, both in Firebug and in Developer tools. I've seen the JIT'er optimize away my line with a breakpoint in both environments, but in Firebug my breakpoints seem to 'catch' a little better.
I'd like to see a lot more work done on breakpoints in the debugger in general and have breakpoints (potentially) survive refreshes (or Webpack autoreloads) where the sources or script filenames have have changed. I suppose the debugger could achieve this linking my breakpoints to line numbers in sourcemaps rather than to the .js files themselves. If it already works this way, then I must be doing something wrong, because I am constantly losing my breakpoints when actively developing code that I am also stepping through.
5. Could we just have the Firebug UI atop the Developer Tools? Firebug has made Firefox unstable lately leading to stalls and shutdown timeouts. I would love to see Firebug team re-skin the developer tools with their UI and throw away the firebug kernel. The native integrations in developer tools are bound to do a much better job debugging than an extension like Firebug ever could. I thought I heard that this was the plan for Firebug.next, and I am all for it.
How about...open everything in Atom instead, so you can use what you're used to (or vim / emacs / ST / whatever), and have that be able to e.g. Set break points and inspect stacks? Separate the IDE from the browser so they can each evolve faster. Give and API to interact with the browser so anything can integrate with it.
Intriguing! If I ever get into an extended debugging session, I might try it.
I try to TDD my code (or at least write lots of tests to dig myself out of the hole), so I don't find myself doing heavy breakpoint debugging as much these days.
I figured it would only be fair if I stick it to Firebug a little bit too.
1. Having a dropdown for sources in the Scripts pane is unwieldy/useless for large sites with tens of different scripts. The Developer Tools get this most right by having a docked Sources/Call Stack navigation panel to the left of the source.
2. Inspecting a JS Object's value in the Watch panel pops over to the DOM tab to view it there. I've always thought that tab was oddly named and that made the transition confusing since I'm often not looking at DOM objects there. I think that tab should be named "Object" or "Object Viewer".
Ed: you should try ( and provide feedback to ) Firebug 3, they're dong exactly what you described - implementing Firebug UX on top of Firefox Devtools:
I really dislike how laptops (MB[P] or other) override the function keys with the laptop controls. I know you can usually set it to be Fn+F<key> to do things like volume, brightness but I think the function keys should keep their original uses first.
Yep, function keys were sacrificed so that manufacturers could drop dedicated keys for functions like volume and brightness. I personally think it was a good move, but as a consequence I rarely use the Fn+F* key combos in applications and my apps don't bind to Function keys.
1. Just make Find work right. I need global find, that's all I need. On what corporate drone planet is it a smart idea to prepend an exclamation mark to search terms to request a global find? Chrome makes the same mistake - The Search Company got Find wrong... (Perhaps Chrome ain't all that and a bag of chips!?)
MAKE CTRL-F DEFAULT TO GLOBAL FIND! [Scream your favorite cuss word now if you're with me on this!] One strike and you're out when you screw up something dead simple like Find!
I don't need file-catalogged search results where I stoke my chin and ponder all the matches; just go to each match by jumping around directly in the source, let me hold down Enter while you cycle through the matches and source files, let me know when we wrap around the search result list with a little informative "search results wrapped" pop-under - how do I describe my frustration?? FIND IS VERY UNPRODUCTIVE AND OVER-ENGINEERED IN DEVELOPER TOOLS. This is somebody's baby, I'm sorry to whomever if he is reading this - I just think simple is the key and that's what Firebug has going for it. Just do me a favor and toss the whole Find as you got it into an Advanced Find dialog box and give me simple, Firebug-style, rip n' roll global find in Developer Tools, PLEASE.
2. I know Firebug is an opt-in extension, so they have the right to do this, but ... Firebug puts that handy bug icon on the location bar for popping open the firebug panel. It's nice, appeals to my lazy muscle memory! I'm sure the Firefox Developer Edition does something similar (right??), and they wouldn't force me to go rummage the hamburger menu for their link in that version of Firefox. But, I'm too unmotivated to switch to that version of Firefox. I'm far too unmotivated to customize my location bar (except to remove the new Pocket icon, gross.) The firebug icon is beautiful, I want to click its button.
3. I like the tabs in firebug better than those in developer tools. The CSS inspector is great in Firebug, always has been very productive.
4. Breakpoints are hinky in Firefox in general, both in Firebug and in Developer tools. I've seen the JIT'er optimize away my line with a breakpoint in both environments, but in Firebug my breakpoints seem to 'catch' a little better.
I'd like to see a lot more work done on breakpoints in the debugger in general and have breakpoints (potentially) survive refreshes (or Webpack autoreloads) where the sources or script filenames have have changed. I suppose the debugger could achieve this linking my breakpoints to line numbers in sourcemaps rather than to the .js files themselves. If it already works this way, then I must be doing something wrong, because I am constantly losing my breakpoints when actively developing code that I am also stepping through.
5. Could we just have the Firebug UI atop the Developer Tools? Firebug has made Firefox unstable lately leading to stalls and shutdown timeouts. I would love to see Firebug team re-skin the developer tools with their UI and throw away the firebug kernel. The native integrations in developer tools are bound to do a much better job debugging than an extension like Firebug ever could. I thought I heard that this was the plan for Firebug.next, and I am all for it.