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So long Firebug. It was like Christmas when we first saw what you did for us.

I'm glad to see Firebug being replace with a more modern set of tools, but you're right - Firebug (and the webkit devtools that followed from it) is/was amazing. It was probably the most significant change in front-end web development I've experienced in my 15ish year career.

XMLHttpRequest was released by MS in IE 5 in 1999, which is less than 15 years ago. I'd say that the development of ajax was far more significant than some dev tools.

And as a slight nitpick, the IE Dev toolbar came out about 6 months before Firebug and as best I can remember actually had more functionality than Firebug for quite a while.

It's some sort of persistent web developer myth that Firebug came first. Firebug was just easier to find/install, you had to know that the IE6 developer toolbar existed.

NB: I hate IE as much as the next web dev, but credit where credit's due...

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