It's not like anyone has taken that away from you.

And as for the new tool, since it also shares the Mozilla engine, it's as if you're using Firefox (+ some plugins) with regards to web behavior.

This would probably start the trend of the dev features being reduced in regular browsers, I'd guess. But you're right no one is taking it away yet.

Why would any browser vendor have an incentive to remove or restrict developer features in released browsers?

Funny story came to mind: You ever have a client accidentally hit F12, then tell your boss that your product was broken because there was a weird thing taking up half the screen?

Seriously: My guess would be download size, performance, maintenance. Especially with Moz aiming to target super cheap hardware with their OS.

It seems like it’d be beneficial to many web publishers if browser users couldn’t easily access underlying resources, and those companies could incentivize popular vendors to go in that direction (and every decent browser auto-updates, of course). Suddenly bypassing Flickr’s spaceball becomes too complicated for regular user.

On the other hand, no one would bother with that in a world where non-mobile computers are increasingly becoming developer-only machines, so this is probably just mild paranoia.

That's a really important aspect, are desktops going the route of developer only? (Non-web) Designers and other white collar probably don't need it, but they use machines that wouldn't notice the difference...

With FFOS, Android/Chrome, and MS there's a conscious effort to eliminate the difference in development between desktop, tablet and phone. With more people using computers, not as many people need or want desktop apps and those features on all of their desktop apps. If I suddenly need to edit an image, I don't need PS or even Gimp, I'm often fine with a web app.

It's not about already released browsers, but possibly future versions.

There have been some phishing attacks that relied on users accessing the dev tools.

How?

Generally by asking them to paste code into the JavaScript console. Here's an example:

http://sdpcfix.com/security-alerts/facebook-scam-helps-trick...

We should instead remove access to the keyboard, that would be a way more effective way to stop any situation where theses users would cause a security issue.

Seriously, it's not the first kind of attack that appear because users are too naive. At one point we need to trace the line somewhere. Should we also block copy-paste to a file in case they create a batch file?

Greasemonkey has similar protections around copy-pasting userscripts, for this very same reason. It's not so unreasonable

We no longer trust the user for anything, instead we block him completely and we move features on another application. I don't believe that's the right way to do it. This only make him more stupid, not more secure.