There are some pretty strong fundamental reasons why you want to have debugging tools be exactly in sync with releases, especially when you are making major changes to feature support and rendering. Also, in this day it just makes sense to have such tools integrated in the browser.
Now, the Firefox team might not be pulling off the execution very well (though it's a little unfair to compare an early generation product to a more evolved product) but I think it's probably the right decision for the future, hopefully they'll iterate on it enough to get it into a good state.
However, all of this is sort of beside the point. The Firebug lead went to go work for the Chrome team, so the Firefox team is in a bit of a pickle.
> There are some pretty strong fundamental reasons why you want to have debugging tools be exactly in sync with releases, especially when you are making major changes to feature support and rendering. Also, in this day it just makes sense to have such tools integrated in the browser.
That's cool and I can see that, but it does not explain why they're not building on Firebug's established base.
> However, all of this is sort of beside the point. The Firebug lead went to go work for the Chrome team, so the Firefox team is in a bit of a pickle.
Firebug already survived the departure of its founder years ago, if there's a will it can survive Barton's as well.
As I understand it there are limitations to the way firebug (as an extension) works that would make continued development and adding new features problematic. I don't know enough about Firefox's dev tools work to say whether or not it even makes sense to make use of firebug's code base and whether or not that sort of thing will happen in the future. It would be a huge failure if the firefox devs couldn't even manage to match the functionality of firebug, but it's more than a little too early to say that that will be the case.
As to the development team, there's a difference between surviving and thriving. Especially as the pace of firefox development has been accelerating I think bringing dev tool support in house is the only rational choice.
Now, the Firefox team might not be pulling off the execution very well (though it's a little unfair to compare an early generation product to a more evolved product) but I think it's probably the right decision for the future, hopefully they'll iterate on it enough to get it into a good state.
However, all of this is sort of beside the point. The Firebug lead went to go work for the Chrome team, so the Firefox team is in a bit of a pickle.