I agree that the Chrome inspector is missing some things that Firebug has (primarily, it is unable to render the HTML returned in XHR requests - this is a big deal for me, since I use Django which returns debug pages in HTML, and I do a ton of XHR in my applications) but I use it when I can simply because it hangs less, crashes less and is faster overall for me. You should know though that there's a Firebug Lite bookmarklet available for Chrome - that's what I use when I need to examine XHR responses. There's probably a plugin for it too.

Also how recently have you tried the Chrome inspector? It's been getting a lot of attention lately from the dev team.

Out of curiosity, what do you like better about Firebug? I've been using the Chrome web inspector for awhile now and loving it. Maybe there's some feature in Firebug that's useful that I don't know about yet though.

I’m a Safari user primarily, and while I generally use the webkit inspector as a last ditch when Firebug is being stupid, Firebug is much better at listing css styles. Webkit’s styles have way too much in the way of per-selector headers.