> As an aside I always kind of wondered why all browsers started including developer tools by default as they are not of use to 99.9% of users.
AFAIK the firefox devtools team has plans/ideas that the devtools could just used like a normal Web App (loaded from a server). Currently, they are migrating XUL based components over to normal html what would make this possible.
Back in the IE 6 days, I used Firebug Lite [0] by adding a script tag in my HTML that would recreate the Firebug interface and most of its capabilities as a panel injected into the page.
Yes, in 2017 we'll be shipping DevTools outside of Firefox. At first it will probably be an add-on and we'll evolve from there. But it should mean less time between features and fixes and deliver to developers.
Dragonfly[0], Presto's old dev tools, was essentially a web app (and, IIRC, although cached was loaded as if any other web app), though it had access to some APIs normal websites did not, to be able to communicate with the browser through the Scope protocol[1].
AFAIK the firefox devtools team has plans/ideas that the devtools could just used like a normal Web App (loaded from a server). Currently, they are migrating XUL based components over to normal html what would make this possible.
As an example, just like debugger.html which can even be used from any browser in a not-builtin way: https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html