Agreed! My work was done on OSX, as a proof of concept. My colleague Hayden is doing some great work to carry it forward, including Windows support (https://github.com/dhdemerson/VerticalTabs)
Thanks for pointing this out, I should have made mention in my post :) I've have seen tree style tabs – which does a great job for more advanced organization of tabs. For my experiments (and Firefox features in general), we try and focus on simplicity and the more general audience.
Right now it works (best) on OSX, I'd love to get some help to make it work better across platforms. My colleague Hayden's work will probably progress faster than mine (this was just a side project for me!) https://github.com/dhdemerson/VerticalTabs
Thanks for the comment, we always try and cater to as many of our users as possible. If you've used our tools, are there particular areas that cause more trouble than others? Do you find the dark or light theme easier to navigate (available in Nightly builds right now)? Would love to hear how our tools can be improved in this regard! Feel free to email me at darrin[at]mozilla.com if you'd rather not post on HN.
You should grab our Nightly build then :) We have parsed responses in the Network tab, I just tried HTML and JSON for you and both show as expected. See http://imgur.com/OHO4lFH and get Nightly at http://nightly.mozilla.org/.
Sorry, that is just a prototype for now! We are in the process of designing and planning the memory (and performance) tools, which should hopefully be available sometime this year.
We (I am the author of that post) definitely care about color blind users and want to make our tools as usable for as many people as possible! Photoshop allows you to simulate varieties of color blindness and we keep that in mind. We are also trying to provide better visual cues, like shapes/textures rather than relying solely on colors. The network panel in nightly for example has shapes to indicate HTTP response codes.
Secondly, once you switch to the light theme (available in the options pane of nightly) it should persist for you, so it will become your "default".
FWIW, you have pretty fine grained control over what appears in the console (CSS, JS, Logs, etc.) as well as the level of logging (Error, Warning, Log)... see the dropdown buttons at the top of the console tab :)