Firebug is certainly a wonderful tool for javascript debugging; I use console.log() extensively.
I wanted to know if I can leave the Firebug-specific code in production.
Some compressors will strip out any line prefixed by ;;; (which is a legal sequence to have, being three empty statements.) This way you're not strictly limited to console references (i.e. you could do some calculations and then console.log() the result at the end, and the compressor can strip all of them out.) I use JavaScript::Minifier for this.