[blasdel]

The Firebug team is worried because Mozilla have been passive-aggressively antagonistic towards them for a long time. Mozilla heavily promoted their abjectly useless "Web Developer Toolbar" extension for years, even bundling it with the browser by default. They also have not been shy about breaking Firebug with every major release, basically not taking it seriously at all.

Now they've started down the usual embrace-extend-extinguish path that they've taken before with Firefox extensions — bake an unremovable inflexible implementation of the basic functionality into the browser, with a perspective twist of some kind, and major core API changes that make it difficult for the original extension to continue development.

They're worried about them doing AwesomeBug in a future release.

[dangoor]

Things are almost always more complex than they appear.

Developer tooling is an important area, and we want to see some great tools that make sense for a broad audience to be shipped with Firefox out of the box.

What those tools look like and how they're built are some big questions that we're working on answering, and we're starting to answer them:

http://mozilla.github.com/devtools/next.html

I've been manager of Developer Tools at Mozilla for 3 months, and I can't really comment on how things were before that. What I can say is that right now Mozilla employs someone full time to work on Firebug. Firefox 4 beta 7 has been held up in part to fix some things that have broken Firebug. We do care about Firebug.

If you follow the link I just posted (which I should note is a draft that will likely get some revisions soon), you'll see that I'm keen on us building new APIs that make all sorts of developer tools, including Firebug, easier to write and more stable.

I am not worried about "AwesomeBug". Firebug is already an awesome open source project, and they're free to take the project in whatever directions they wish. I am worried about Firefox having the best developer tools available anywhere (via built-in product features and add-ons).

[robin_reala]

Mozilla heavily promoted their abjectly useless "Web Developer Toolbar" extension for years, even bundling it with the browser by default.

The Web Developer Toolbar was made by Chris Pederick, not Mozilla. It’s also never been bundled with Firefox.

[blasdel]

You're right, the orthogonally-useless https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6622/ is what I was remembering, it was bundled vaguely as "Developer Tools" in the installer until Firefox 3.

Obnoxiously hard to google for, I ended up having to dig up a Windows VM and an old Firefox installer to figure out what it was.

[robin_reala]

Ah yeah, DOMi. It’s true that it’s seriously out of date now, but at the time (pre Firebug 0.4) and when combined with the Venkman JS debugger it was the only decent way to properly understand what was happening with problematic dynamic pages.