yep, they have a persistence button like firebug these days. on the network panel it's the black circle, and the console seems to have it in a settings panel (although I'm on a dev build, I think it's also a button on release build.

agreed about the little things like hovers. I still find that double clicks on image resources in css not opening them in a new tab drives me mad :)

I do love chromes timings panel, with rendering timings. much better for optimizing. and their whole dev tools seem to run a lot quicker for me, firebug I have speed issues with sometimes, especially on complicated js pages.