A mild concern of mine with the "Google, if you’re listening" annotations. It's worth remembering that Chromium's an open-source project. If you really want something, send a patch.
You actually bring up a good point, the webkit inspector right now is tied to the webkit project, and the barrier to contribution is prohibitively high. I've suggested to Paul Irish separating the two projects and making them more independent, though I'm not sure what the feasibility of that is.
I can either try to submit a patch and likely fail, or blog about it. Last time I complained to Google about Chrome, they filed 33 bugs and fixed many of them. The point here is to be an agent of change, not an agent of patches :)
Well, discussion is fine too and not every web developer is in a position to knock out some detailed C++.
But this is still a valid point in the sense that Chromium is run much more in the spirit of an open-source project than other large-scale commercial open source efforts. External patches do make their way into Chromium.
I'm probably not the only one, but I have no idea where the separation between Chromium and Chrome actually is. Can anyone enlighten me as to where the separation really is? Is Chrome a fork of Chromium, is Chromium an upstream? I know they actively work together in a lot of ways but how exactly?
Aside from the obvious - branding and stability - It's mainly the commercial stuff (MP3, PDF, Flash) which can't be distributed under Chromium's license.
It can be useful to engage open source projects of this size on other grounds - I can't speak for Chromium, but with many significant projects, a patch with some code is less than useful if there's been no discussion around it.
I can either try to submit a patch and likely fail, or blog about it. Last time I complained to Google about Chrome, they filed 33 bugs and fixed many of them. The point here is to be an agent of change, not an agent of patches :)