Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

I'm @paulrouget. I'm part of the Firefox Developer Tools team (we are working on the builtin tools and Firebug). I believe that the HN community includes a lot of web developers and designers, so I guess you can help us.

We have recently added a bunch of new builtin tools in Firefox (please try Firefox Aurora or Firefox Nightly to see a recent version of these tools). We also redesigned the way we show these tools (screenshot here: http://paulrouget.com/e/toolboxTesting/).

We are now working on defining what should be our next moves, and I'm trying to gather as much feedback as possible.

The current plan is to build a bunch of performance-related tools (see https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mozilla.dev.developer-tools/L9vfZ1-smUI), improve the user interface (better theme), make the tools remotable (for mobile development), and drastically improve the WebConsole (see an experiment here: http://paulrouget.com/e/jsterm.v2/).

But we really want to get as much feedback as possible to make sure we're going into the right direction.

What do you think we should add/remove/fix in our tools? Anything you miss from Chrome or Opera? Or anything you haven't seen yet you'll like to see part of the browser?

PS: because a lot of people have raised concern about "cluttering" Firefox: we are considering providing some of these tools only as addons, to keep the Firefox DevTools as simple as possible.

Honestly, the absolute best thing you could do for any dev, is lighten the footprint FF currently has on my ram, and continue to improve the api for add-ons/plugins. The more stable, extensible and fast FireFox is, the more useful I will find it for development. But if more kludge is added to it, and it continues to get slower/bigger, the less likely I am to continue to use it, regardless of what amazing plugins are available (FireBug, Web Developer Tool Bar, etc)

If you are just looking at what's best to add to the browser itself, just look at the plugin market to see what's in wide use.

Support V8's debugger protocol so we can use the WebKit Inspector.

How about exposing an API for dev tools similar to the "swank" protocol that Emacs uses for editing Lisp code? I know there are people doing stuff like this already, but it would obviously be a lot easier if there were a nice protocol for it (ideally standardized across browsers...). I want to be able to seamlessly interact with a running Firefox instance from my editor or IDE, sending it snippets of code to evaluate and seeing my page change in real-time.

The JavaScript object browser mini-windows do not behave properly on Awesome, a tiling window manager. There is no way to close the windows without closing the entire web console. If I try to close the window like I close any other window, it will close the full browser window.