zlacker

Firefox gave birth to the first good dev tools as an extension IIRC

>>quickt+(OP)
Yep, Firebug

>>quickt+(OP)
A testament to how open its old extension API was.

>>quickt+(OP)
You're definitely right.

I'll go even further; As I remember it Chrome Dev Tools pretty much copied Firebug's homework in terms of UI and feature set.

>>quickt+(OP)
And then completely lost the plot and has been behind Chrome for the last ten years.

>>HeckFe+wf
The Firefox extension API (which wasn't an API really at all when it was first used) was created to support cases like the DOM Inspector and others which abused Mozilla's XPInstall and XUL overlays (both created for other purposes) to invent extensions. The same people that created the APIs were the same people building those extensions (see Joe Hewitt for Firefox and DOMI and later Firebug.)