In the olden days, before each facet of web or internet use became an end to itself, functionality was combined into the browser (FireFox, for instance) instead of constantly being limited. Sure, there are lots of fancy new approaches, many of which will die on the vine within a ‘product cycle’ or two, but base function should remain and be easy to use and approach.
Element properties was one such basic function. It was removed from the shiny new v. 3.6 and not returned in the base code: too weighty, not enough interest, don’t like seeing the extra menu item, only a few people have found the extension (or AddOn) and re-installed it. This is all very weak reasoning: I learned a lot of html, css, and javascript and other languages by simply checking element properties. People today do not have that option. There are some ways to find information on some of the elements that construe a web-page (remember those? called up with URL’s?) but the ways to find this information are distributed, sporadic and messy. They do not often correlate with the base foundation of the construction of the page. This is wrong. Each element displayed (or not displayed) in the browser should be identifiable, simply and elegantly. Changing the code base and requiring new methods for addons is fine, but useful addons are constantly being excluded in this way. I’m not sure what the gain is, but I am sure of the basic functions as they are lost, one at a time.