> Ten years ago today we introduced the first version of Web Inspector to the world. That time was the wild west of web development, when your best debugging aid was alert(). While the earliest version of Web Inspector was limited (it didn’t even have a console), it did expose two things that developers didn’t have much insight into — the DOM tree and matching style rules.<p>The current crop of web inspectors all trace their (spritual) lineage to DOM Inspector, and to an extent, Mozilla's old JavaScript debugger Venkman. Both showed up in 2001.