I hate how Opera never gets any love. It's been the most innovative browser for years now, it had tabs before other browsers even had an MDI and was fast even on my PC with 16 MB RAM.
I was a long time Opera user and love its configurability and full keyboard support for general browsing, but the Chromium dev tools won me over from a developer perspective and I disliked switching between the two.
You should check out the new Dragonfly. Grab the Opera Next build http://www.opera.com/browser/next/ to poke around. Dragonfly has gotten a masssive upgrade in the past 6mo.
That said, the Chrome dev tools are pretty righteous, too. :)
Hmm, I always prefer Firebug for development, but development and browsing are two separate tasks, so I have no problem using both. Chrome is a solid browser too, though.
Just booted up firebug due to your comment because I hadn't used it in a while. Here is my reaction after using Chromium dev tools:
- JavaScript auto complete text doesn't display right, it is a different font size shadow that obscures the typed text.
- Pressing tab multiple times will not cycle autocomplete, but instead jump the focus out of the console and into the search prompt.
- Really minor, but I prefer a terminal where the output and input are simply in the same line rather than in seperate locations that require looking back and forth.
- If I declare a function "hello" in the terminal, and then type "hello", it merely prints "hello()" instead of printing the source of the function. Printing the source of the function with no extra work is especially valuable if I grab the non minimized version of a new javascript library and want to poke around and see what everything does.
+ I do think the "Net" tab displays requests a bit more concisely than Chromium. This could be beneficial if you are dealing with pages with lots of pictures.
= CSS and DOM inspection seems about equal.
My main concern is JavaScript though, as my current app is doing all of its rendering client side with only the Model layer on server.
The console isn't as advanced in Firebug as Chromium or Safari, no doubt. I prefer the CSS and DOM inspection system, however - having to pause JS execution to look at the current state is not nearly as convenient. If you want to do that, though, Firebug offers that as well.
I've tried using Dragonfly several times and I can never even get started with it. It's one of those programs which I simply cannot penetrate the UI. This isn't surprising when it's an app like Blender, but I'm not sure how a browser debugger could be so confusing.
