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Comment by beck5 | Hacker News Reader

Are they going to fully integrate firebug into firefox rather than having it as an extension?

As I understand it (it's still somewhat in the planning stages, and things are evolving), Firefox will ship with a set of developer tools which will cover the major use cases (inspector, console, etc). Firebug will be an extension, and will add more advanced functionality. It's being rewritten in JavaScript, and could potentially work on any browser (Firebug and Firebug Lite are going to merge).

This is how I understood it when I talked to the Firebug team a few months ago. Mozilla has since hired a ton of people for their Dev Tools team and John J Barton has left Firebug due to lack of funding from IBM -- so I have no clue if things have since changed.

PLEASE integrate these things carefully and in a sensible way. If I have to use "dev tools" for x, b, and z and firebug for a, y and c that's going to be annoying as hell.

You will not be annoyed. Promise :)

http://blog.mozilla.com/devtools/2011/05/25/the-relationship...

tldr; no. Firebug is an independent (but with Mozilla's support and blessing) project and we're also building some great tools that will ship with the browser.

The vast majority of users don't need it. If they want to make it native, simply bundle it with a dev version. As useful as firebug is, more FF users would probably benefit from a button that converts a page from English to Spanish (I'm aware Chrome already does this). I think they should just put out the most focussed product possible, and allow their healthy dev community to add any functionality missing.

That said, "packages" might be a good idea. The "paranoid package" could bundle adblock, noscript, trackmenot, and foxyproxy. The "developer package" could bundle firebug and anything else that might be useful. Offering binaries with these packages pre-installed from a visible link on the main download page might not be a bad idea.

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