Hacking Mountain Lion: Bringing the old Web Inspector back | Hacker News Reader

Hacking Mountain Lion: Bringing the old Web Inspector back

thomasst.ch

30 pointsbound00834 comments

You can't create new style rules with the new inspector.

It's also buggy and skow to the point of being unusable.

Who ever thought that was ready for release must be out of his mind.

Also, if you chose "use webkit inspector" you're no longer able to view source.

I'm left with no alternative. Chrome is hideous on OS X and I hate that omnibar that Safari now shares. I'm using Safari for browsing and chrome for developing but it's a terrible experience.

You can view source using Opt - Cmd - U as in the past, it just opens up in the Web Inspector now. Still the same, old source code though. You can switch between the source code and the DOM tree by clicking on that weird green icon above the source.

In my Mac you can't. 10.8.2

If you choose “Use WebKit Inspector” Opt-Cmd-U does nothing.

"I'm left with no alternative. "

How about Firefox (I'm running 15.01), and Firebug?

I'm not a fan of Firebug and I don't like Firefox's text rendering.

Yeah, as he said, no alternative.

May I ask what's so bad about Chrome on OSX?

Answering because I also think it's hideous: the tool bar style and color are different from the rest of the OS. The new icon is way flatter than anything else in the dock (save the new Messages icon, maybe; see [1]). Even though I found a nice-looking skin on my one Mac, there doesn't seem to be any way to find out the theme's name and install it on my other Mac. The right-click menu is different than in all other web views on the system (at least in the German localization). The built-in dictionary lookup support (what is triple tap nowadays) is getting there, but still worse than Safari in my experience.

[1] http://maururu.net/2011/old-chrome-icons/

Yes, that's mostly it. Ugly toolbar and address bar, can't use built-in dictionary, slightly worse text rendering, etc.

Oh yes, and if you want to grab the window, you have exactly 11px for that. Try it after lot's of coffee.

I find Chrome beautiful on Windows. In full screen, it's a natural fit, one of the best Windows apps. But on the Mac, it annoys me and hurts my eyes.

And I know it's old fashion, but if you are among the 0.5% of the population that can actually distinguish a URL from a search query, you are out of luck.

PS: if you do find out the theme's name please post it here, thanks.

The thing that I hate about these "omnibars" is that I used to be able to type a URL into the search box and get information about it directly without going there. It now takes two steps (google.com, enter URL).

I type something like "amazon.com q" then quickly erase the q and let instant search change the results.

I just now realized that I should be typing "!g amazon.com", because I have duckduckgoog installed. (google search with DDG shortcodes)

> slightly worse text rendering

Huge, huge understatement. And I have a 2009 MacBook Pro (not a retina one). I just can't imagine how poor Chrome's rendering might be for those poor people who have rMBP...

Also, Safari's multitouch behavior is far more sane and elegant than Chrome. The pinch to zoom continuously zooms into the page, rather than just scaling the font. The swipe forward/back is visually fluid, showing behind-this-pane previews of where I'm going back to. Double tap to focus on a block of text is convenient.

Ok, so it's eye candy and the built-in dictionary from what I can make out from your post.

I agree with the dictionary, the icon and to some degree the right click menu - two of those features I hardly use however. The toolbar looks just fine for me, I don't need uniform toolbar styles over all my apps. iTunes, for example, breaks the OSX style as well and it's an Apple app. Graphically Chrome looks much cleaner to me than Safari, but I guess that's all subjective. I have to say though, that they did some graphical updates lately I don't agree with at all - noticeably the removal of the "plus" icon on the new tab button as well as the change of the tools button icon from a recognizable wrench (or whatever it was) to a generic list icon.

Graphically Chrome looks much cleaner to me than Safari, but I guess that's all subjective.

Safari's only color is the favicon of the current selected tab. Chrome shows all tabs favicons, plus a ”blue folder” for every bookmark folder and white document for every bookmarklet.

And the shades of gray are different from anything else on the system, and vary all over the place like crazy (Rollover, background tab vs foreground, etc).

Safari's toolbar, on the other hand is a single gray gradient from top to bottom.

And that's important because?

What makes Chrome look cleaner to me is mostly the number of strong horizontal / vertical lines I have to orient my eyes at - and in what order those lines appear. In chrome I see

First line = bottom border of OSX menu bar

Second line = top border of tab

Oh look, here is the content I'm looking for, website icon plus website title -> nice.

In Safari:

First line = bottom border of menu bar

Second line = top border of URL bar

Nothing of interest here, I know which site I'm at right now

Third line = bottom border of URL bar

fourth line = bottom border of toolbar

Ok, now I see tabs. But NO ICON! It's very hard to make out the different websites I have open.

Not just the dictionary but all built in OS X cocoa niceties (of which the dictionary is one but only a small part of it) suffer in highly custom UIs like Chrome

I'm kind of relieved that you only think it to be literally hideous

Pinch to zoom (double tap) doesn't work. (pinch to zoom actually work, but in noticable increments, not smooth.)

Yes that's true. That's the only feature mentioned here that I do miss as well on Chrome.

We're developing a OS X Cocoa app that has a large Webkit component which uses whatever Safari on your system uses for the inspector. So Chrome isn't always a good option.

Same thoughts here, I already normally use Chrome when possible but I have no choice for debugging Safari Mobile.

By replacing your system frameworks with those from a WebKit nightly you're going to see trouble with OS X software updates, system-wide instability due to running bleeding-edge code, and a test environment which isn't representative of what your users will see.

If for some reason you need to use the frameworks from a WebKit nightly with your application, use DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH to point your app at the WebKit nightly's frameworks. This has the same benefit without any of the downsides mentioned above.

The new inspector is totally unusable. It doesn't seem to solve any of the normal workflows that you run into doing front end dev work. Like inspecting source, looking at the console, looking at network traffic, request/response headers and contents, etc. The console lags unbearably. Even printing an object, it gives you a nice view of the contents but opening it might take 10 seconds. The list goes on. Fortunately I don't have to debug much js at the moment but I switch to Chrome when I need to. Very glad to be able to switch back now with just WebKit because I do prefer it as a browser.

A couple reasons not to do this:

1. Your frameworks are out of sync with the the rest of the system, could cause problems updating.

2. You're now running super-buggy development WebKit. The code you're using was written a few hours ago, remember that.

3. The old WebKit inspector doesn't have retina support. If you've got a rMBP and care about how it looks, don't do this.

4. The article gives no information on how to go "back" after you've done it.

It's developement version, but I wouldn't call it super-buggy. WebKit project has strict development process, each commit is rigourously reviewed and tested before merging.

You will likely run into problems if you enable experimental flags though.

While the WebKit project has a strict review process and a substantial amount of regression testing, code reviews can't catch all issues and WebKit doesn't have complete test coverage for all aspects of web technology. Changes can, and often do, introduces regressions from subtle rendering errors to all-out crashes.

These sorts of temporary issues aren't that a big deal if it's in a separate application that you use only for testing, but they're a darn sight more painful when you replace your system WebKit frameworks and they start impacting things like your email client or the system installer stack.

My comment on the post shows how to go "back"

Repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440198

I didn't think reposts were possible?

downvote, really?

Replacing WebKit, WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks is a bit risky because many system components depend on them. I would replace only inspector files (mostly JavaScript) instead as described in https://gist.github.com/3898054

I love how you can't even see POST data in the new inspector

Wow, I had no idea the Safari Inspector was so bad. Because I've stopped using Safari at all..it's performance even on my brand new MBP is atrocious...maybe it's because of how the loading bar painfully crawls across the browser, accentuating the load times. Or maybe it's just the crashing.

I'm glad I didn't try the inspector...it would've driven me crazy but I wouldn't have guessed that they just killed the inspector

Want the old Activity Viewer back so much

Reply on news.ycombinator.com