
State of Web Inspector - zekers
https://www.webkit.org/blog/2518/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.

~~~
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.

~~~
othermaciej
Try the version in WebKit nightlies and the OS X Mavericks developer preview.
It's much improved from Safari 6.

~~~
jasonlotito
While being much improved over previous version of Safari 6, that's not saying
anything. It's still abysmal, and Chrome and Firefox are still leaps and
bounds ahead.

~~~
othermaciej
Do you have any specific feedback about things you have problems with?

~~~
jasonlotito
I'm just now reading this but when I get a chance ill try to give a complete
run down of issues I have.

~~~
chris_wot
Not even a few that come to mind immediately?

~~~
jasonlotito
I was replying on an iPad, and wanted to give better information than merely
what I remembered.

------
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.

~~~
randallu
The comment was that it was hard to maintain the way that it was written,
which is probably true (there were hooks everywhere!). I don't know if there
are any clever allocator/macro tricks you can use to know how many of each
kind of object is allocated without a big perf hit.

------
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](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
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.

~~~
pjscott
More precisely, they forked WebKit:

[http://www.chromium.org/blink](http://www.chromium.org/blink)

------
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...](http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebInspectorUI/APPLE_IMAGES_LICENSE.rtf)

------
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.

