Web dev tools are something I have to take people's word for (and, to be clear, have no reason to doubt) since I don't do that kind of work so I have no clue what makes for good tools versus bad ones. But, my overall point still stands: If this is such a major failing in Firefox, is there nobody passionate enough to help keep a browser--that lots of people claim to want to use but for those tools--up to par with the competition?

Firefox' devtools live in GitHub these days and can be patched without needing to build Firefox. I'm sure they'd welcome contributions from passionate developers.

https://github.com/devtools-html

The original “wow!” development tool for Firefox wasn’t event developed by them, if I recall correctly - Firebug was just an extension, developed by one guy, but the extendion system and developers’ interest in platform were in place

I use Firefox day in and day out and the only time I have found myself using Chrome is when I have to do profiling and even then that is because profiling tools in all browsers kinda sucks.

I have often wondered what is the killer feature that Chrome dev tools has that Firefox does not that forces people to switch back to Chrome as this seems to be a common refrain and while I don't work on the dev tools I sometimes wonder what awesome feature I am missing in Chrome...

In some cases, I actually find Chrome lacking. For example, the ability to see what events are attached to a dom element.

DISCLAIMER: I do not work on the developer tools for Chrome or Firefox and don't do much CSS.