past

> and therefore did not liked it, when frequently changes broke their setup.

Which is unfortunately an inherent problem with our legacy customization approach.

And it is clearly not something the vast majority of users want, if they left Firefox for another browser that appears to them less customizable but more stable. We have run numerous user studies about what users actually care for and they have all informed what Firefox is going to be in the future.

Thanks for the suggestion, this has now been fixed.

about:permissions was an incomplete experimental UI, but a fully functional replacement is high on our priority list. We are waiting on a new design from the UX team at the moment.

This is exactly right that X means "close" or "hide this thing" and this is what it does in this case as well: it removes the non-default setting and hides the list item.

There have been a number of user studies done by Mozilla and other browser vendors that clearly show end users only have a basic grasp of the security properties of the web. So yes, more details in main UI elements leads to confusion. It's just 2 clicks for those of us who know what a certificate is (Ctrl/Cmd-I is even faster).

Anonymous data is by definition not privacy-invasive. That's why it's called anonymous.

You are pretty much describing the Firefox architecture. We are invoking Firefox UI code from scratchpad all the time when prototyping things. Some parts of the UI do not use standard Web APIs (e.g. XUL and XBL), as there are different opinions on how the web platform should evolve to fulfill those needs, but if you include all the experimental technologies to this web kernel, we are already there.

Mozilla has been paying the main Firebug developer for a long time to work on it, but I've never heard of an open source project that would like to be "acquired", whatever that means. If hiring all of the project's developers is what you mean, quite a few of them had high profile jobs already, so funding wasn't an issue here. As for the reasons why simply incorporating Firebug into Firefox wasn't a viable solution, see the original post.

This should actually already work if you are on Firefox 23. Please file a bug if it doesn't.

This is actually in the latest stable Firefox release already (Firefox 23).

As mentioned on the hacks post, ever since Firefox 23 the web console is actually working on the same context as the debugger, when execution is paused on a breakpoint or debugger statement. You can use all the familiar tools in there to examine the current state of the page.

This is already implemented in Firefox 22.

Sorting and filtering are planned, yes.

The inspector has a search box in Firefox 21 and above.

Mozilla can't kill Firebug, even if they wanted, since it's a separate open source project and community. And the only people with two inspectors would be those that elected to have them both, by installing Firebug and using both tools.