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Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

Chrome / Webkit's Dev Tools are so far and away better than Firebug, if you're not giving it a try you're doing yourself a disservice (especially since Chrome is officially stable on Mac and Linux now). The only thing missing is the ability to plug in extensions (like YSlow) but otherwise I never pull up Firefox anymore.

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Ok, I give up. How do I get the style editor to work like Firebug so I can test/tweak styles on the fly? I'd assume you wouldn't be advocating this if it has a read-only style inspector, so where am I missing a way to modify those?

The live style tweak is by far the most used feature in Firebug for my team.

Use a text editor? This seems to be the thing people say they like most about Firebug compared to the WebKit tools. I don't get it. Is the cost of a refresh really so high? There are dozens of editors with built in auto-refresh/live-preview too.

The cost of one refresh no, the cost of a dozen refresh and the associated context switches as you swap between your browser and your editor yes.

Usually when you're editing stuff in Firebug it's because you're trying, nudging a pixel here, a shade of gray there, trying to get the "right" values to yield the effect you want. Having to go back to the editor is a pain, just as it was before in-browser debuggers, when you had to go back to the editor and add alert() traces all over it.

> The only thing missing is the ability to plug in extensions (like YSlow) but otherwise I never pull up Firefox anymore.

On the fly edition of stuff is also nowhere as good as Firebug's (when it works at all).

I've switched to Chrome on my Mac because of its speed and quality of dev tools as well. It's a shame though since Firefox and Firebug were both revolutionary and "raised the bar".

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