State of Web Inspector

[aaronbrethorst]

    Last year, Safari 6 included a re-imagination
    of Web Inspector that aligned the design and
    user experience with Xcode 4. This design,
    while familiar to Mac and iOS developers,
    alienated some web developers familiar with
    the old Web Inspector. Over the last year we
    have listened and have taken all your
    feedback to heart.

You know, it's funny that they'd say this. I'm a Mac and iOS developer, and I hate the design of Safari 6's web inspector. I find the iconography and general user experience inscrutable, I find the changes to View Source make it infuriatingly difficult to use, and the web inspector seems to hang a lot. I hope the new version improves this.

[pdhborges]

I think it is surprising that the old (Safari 6) inspector UI was not about improving the user experience for web developers but instead it was an effort to align "the design and user experience with Xcode 4."

[ramses0]

Safari 6 is useless for development and has made me move to chrome for anything more than console.log.

They're losing.

Firefox + Firebug pulled webdevs away from IE like honey. Chrome is doing the same.

[randallu]

Is all this just because they "lost control" of the old inspector to Google (who invested heavily in it)?

The new one doesn't support the websocket protocol yet so I can't use it in my WK stuff anyway, but I don't know why they spent a bunch of time on a new one. I was also sad to see the "Native Memory Instrumentation" removed from WebKit, because I've always wanted to know "where the memory goes" on any given page.

[huxley]

File a bug on this, it does sound like it shouldn't have disappeared like that.

[jonathanmoore]

I primarily used Safari on the Mac for development and browsing up until Safari 6. After they crippled the web inspector by removing key features and adding the confusing design and layout I switched completely over to Chrome for browsing and dev.

I'll certainly give it another shot, but it'll be hard to give up Chrome as the primary browser.

[emehrkay]

They added an option to use the old (same one chrome uses) inspector

http://i.imgur.com/cgiAjhD.png

[bdash]

That option is present only in WebKit nightly builds, and has been since when the new Web Inspector was introduced.

[tambourine_man]

It has always been there, in the nightlies.

[tambourine_man]

Looks interesting and it's Open Source, so yay. But than again, anything would be better than the unstable, incapable turd that was Safari 6's Web Inspector.

I used to love Safari, it's still my main browser and it was my web developing environment of choice. I really hope Apple can match Google's pace of development, but I think they have lost me for good on the development front.

Releasing that Web Inspector with such different interface, lacking basic features, with zero input from the community and closed source, shows a lack of respect for the developer that will be hard for me to overcome.

[itsmequinn]

Thank God! The current inspector is horrendous. I don't know how to find anything, and I use Xcode regularly.

[jasonlotito]

It's still horrendous. It's better then the previous version, but it's still far behind.

[MartinMond]

Anyone know if Chrome is going to adopt this web inspector?

[adhipg]

I'm pretty sure that the answer is no - considering that Chrome does not use Webkit anymore.

[suyash]

Good Job by the Apple Guys! Now just give us more features than Chrome's web inspector so I can get rid of Chrome.

[McGlockenshire]

Has this been written in such a way that the Blink team will be able to adopt it?

[abarth]

Nope. Portions of the new WebInspectorUI are not even redistributable by third parties: http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebInspectorUI/A...

[danabramov]

It's already there in Mavericks by the way.

[marcolz]

When I read the title, for a moment I thought Google was retiring the Web Inspector from Chrome.