So, it's something like Firebug's console but with :chrome mode and syntax coloring. Am I missing something obvious here?

I believe that Mozilla are trying to recreate most of the functionality of Firebug, but as small, lightweight, addons, rather than the monolithic structure of Firebug.

Firebug has a reputation for being heavyweight, and having memory leak issues, so making similar functionality available in smaller pieces which are simpler to debug/maintain is a definite win.

But Firebug is firebug. It's arguably the best tool available right now.

Actually I find the Chrome developer tools better, specially with the integrated editor and V8 tools.

Agreed. When helping other developers or QA people, it is frustrating that when they use Firefox they may not have Firebug installed and thus we can't research the issue right there.

When they are usng Chrome, the damn thing is built in so I know 100% of the time that we can debug it in the browser where the issue was found.

Breaking down Firebug into separate add-ons seems like a very inconvienent move. Its optimizing around the maintainer, and not the consumer - this is bad.

So if a QA guy is using Firefox, worse case sceario is he downloads Firebug and restarts the browser and reproduces the issue again. In this new model, he could download the one add-on we think we need to figure out the issue, but could end up going back multiple times to install other missing components.

At this point, it needs to be a "developer SDK" or "developer mode" which comes monolithically (For ease of use). If this ends up being a bundle of dependencies of smaller add-ons in the back so be it, but do not require the user to install more than one add-on to get the developer environment.

Chrome did it right in my mind by shipping the whole thing with the product. This also helps garuantee that it doesn't have memory leaks, API integration problems, or other bugs which crop up when delivering what I consider basic functionality as a plug-in.

All the new firefox dev tools ship installed.

Look great!

In the meantime, I am still waiting Chrome to support true multiline editing in the JS console ( http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=35487)

Looks well-done. If possible, Id love to be able to extend it with a custom set of non-js-syntax commands for the current document. If also possible, Id love to embed it in the document-- independent of mozilla.

Id help with a fork if you think that could work.

Oh man, I got really excited because I thought somebody had picked up work on http://jsterm.com/ . Maybe not the best idea to call this one jsterm as well.

Does anyone know what's new in Firefox 16 (that's currently the nightly releases) that makes it a requirement for this?

Firefox 16 has a graphical command line feature that is described at length here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevTools/Features/GCLI

Oh and Firefox 16 is now Aurora as of this week. 17 is the new Nightly.