A couple ideas:

1) You could also log all errors, not only exceptions, to the console. That would allow you to debug production sites, without the visitor even noticing (unless of course, they have Firebug open). This is a very simple function that I use to do so:

// Errors learn Greek (become Exceptions)
function errors_learn_greek($severity, $message, $filename, $lineno) {
throw new ErrorException($message, 0, $severity, $filename, $lineno);
}
set_error_handler(‘errors_learn_greek’);

2) Instead of using a bunch of preg_replace, wouldn’t it be possible to do this “hard work” on the client side, with a script that decodes JSON objects? I haven’t checked into this much yet, but I will. This would also take some load off your server (and hand it to the client, oh well).

Thanks for your efforts!

Mathias Bank » How to debug PHP with Firebug…

http://code.google.com/p/xdump/