More Web Inspector Updates | Hacker News Reader

More Web Inspector Updates

webkit.org

43 pointsalexbosworth14 comments

I love where this is going. I now use Chrome's Dev channel or a WebKit nightly for development, and only launch Firefox/Firebug to do compatibility testing.

Although I still have a ton of respect for Firefox's rendering engine, the browser just feels wrong on the Mac -- not to mention it's slow launch times. The Inspector Panel has caught up to Firebug's functionality in many areas and is now starting to surpass it.

What kills me is launching IE in a VM and discovering how archaic its developer tools are.

I would be the last one to defend IE in general but have you had a look at the Developer Tools of IE8? I think it's pretty decent stuff.

I haven't, I will test those out for sure.

IE8, of course, is the least troublesome but it's good to have options.

It has IE7 "Mode", so you can use the IE8 dev tools to debug IE7 issues.

IE7 mode seems to catch 95% of the cases, but I have had issues crop up in "real" IE7 that were not present when tested under IE8.

I've gotten more used to the inspector, but I absolutely hate the style inspector. Firebug got it right with making it look like your own CSS. Also I often times can't edit a style rule, and I'm not sure why that is.

I hope those things change and improve. It doesn't seem like they want to go the Firebug route with the CSS style inspector.

It also has some presentation issues on longhand overrides of shorthand rules. Eg: If I override margin:0 with margin-top:1em, the margin:0 rule is not struckthrough.

Granted, the most accurate way to present that override would be to display margin: 0 0 0 0, with only the first 0 struckthrough. But that deviates from the written code and becomes more difficult to track.

Could you be more specific? Is it just a font thing?

For my dislike of it? No, it's that I love firebug's way of displaying your CSS entries, and the webkit inspectors way is just less enjoyable to me. I like that in Firebug you inspect your CSS like you would normal CSS, but in inspector it's presented differently. It also has a lot of quirks (try changing a color, it will bork on whitespace in a strange way).

I see this complaint leveraged at the web inspector a lot, but I don't really understand it. It seems like the differences are very subtle.

http://i.imgur.com/amWMy.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/ysH0a.png

(As an aside, note that FireBug doesn't know that the font color has been overridden by the font tag.)

I'm curious what changes specifically you would make to improve it?

The difference is that the rules are rendered using actual CSS syntax, rather than the section heading control.

This makes it very easy to scan because as a web developer, your brain is already trained to parse CSS syntax easily.

The controls in the webkit UI may seem richer, but they aren't actually as efficient as the simple code view that Firebug uses.

It wouldn't seem like a big deal, but in practice I've found I greatly prefer firebug's display.

Most infuriating thing about the Inspector in Safari: the shortcut to open the inspector won't also close it.

Also, no shortcut for going straight into DOM selection in the page. Right-clicking to inspect an element is a valid, but a robust approach, compared to seeking the right element out with the looking glass.

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