| Some random suggestions: (1) Developers do A LOT of style tweaks using the dev tools. In Chrome, this flow has gotten smoother and smoother. For example, the little of feature of having key handlers to jog numeric style properties is huge as it allows you to look at your page and not the value you are changing. Along these lines, here are some things that would go beyond what is currently offered. - Allow me to easily get a diff of the styles that I have changed. I tweak a lot of styles and then I painfully bounce back and forth between my editor trying to make sure I have everything updated. When I forget something, it's lost. (Another angle on this would be to keep a history of the styles that were tweaked so I can get that back after refresh). - You have the beginnings of an awesome z-index debugger with the 3d-view. Make it more interactive. I really want to see the page from the side with the z-index values somehow visible. Debugging z-index issues are a royal pain in the ass and you have a great opportunity to be awesome here. (2) Your network level debugging needs a lot of work to even reach par with WebKit browsers. There is a great opportunity here as well. Even with the features that Chrome offers, I still resort to a debugging proxy for many tasks. Specifically, I use Charles for throttling to test timing on slow networks, replace network resources with a copy on disk (for in the field debugging), visibility into compression and a lot of cache related issues. In fact, tooling that gives visibility into caching behavior would be great. Another area lacking for browsers these days is debugging WebSocket traffic. Chrome's WebSocket visibility doesn't give me the real time visibility I need for message-style traffic. (3) Performance visibility. I worked on the performance related tools in Chrome for a while. In fact, I landed the instrumentation that gave developers visibility into reflow/layout. I want visibility into what is going on in the browser: Reflow, compositing, parsing, HTML tokenization, image decoding, message passing queues. I want to be able to see it all. (4) Expand Scratchpad. I basically want to be able to write a user script without ever having to install anything or open a file. Let me open the scratch pad, write some code and check "run this when example.com/ loads". I have a lot of debugging-in-the-field issues where I end up jumping through hoops to get some custom script to run at startup. Ok, that's a quick 4 off the top of my head. Hope this helps. |
If you're dead set on replacing firebug with the built in tools, they need this feature!