HIhirsin·Jul 19, 2015
I quite like the idea of separating browsers and their dev tools. Beyond the immediate benefits of familiarity for the developer, a standard discovery/communication protocol helps reinforce both standards compliance and good documentation processes.
As it stands, there is no standard for dev tool communication. V1.1 of Chrome Debug protocol, which we used to teach IE to speak to Chrome dev tools [1], is a good start though. However, with the deeper (ie profiling) features of browser dev tools, you tend to find a lot of "blit a chunk of memory to the dev tools", which would almost never end up being standards compliant. So there's still some internal work to be done before Kenneth's dream of truly interoperable dev tools can become reality.
1. https://github.com/Microsoft/IEDiagnosticsAdapter
In Taking Chrome DevTools outside the browser