Safari: the hidden developer tools

by Christopher Hill on 9th April, 2008

I’m a developer. A such I require tools to help me, such as Web developer and Firebug. However, Firefox has become so unstable for me that I have been forced over to Safari. There are a lot of things I miss from Firefox:

  • Cmd+Shift+T to reopen the last closed tabs
  • Cmd+U view source.
  • The “Add bookmark here” extension.
  • Web developer
  • Firebug
  • Right clicking on an image > properties.
  • Saving form credentials, and providing it in an easy to use place (No, I don’t count Keychain as an easy to use place).

It’s not all bad news though, Safari is very good for some things:

  • Super fast.
  • Great rendering.
  • The activity window is pretty cool. Never used it though…
  • Much more stable.
  • Less CPU intensive.

Ok. I was struggling towards the end of that list. However, I discovered a very two interesting feature of Safari which I have missed out on for 2 years; Web Inspector and Drosera. To give a quote from each feature:

The Web Inspector allows you to view the page source, live DOM hierarchy and resources.

Drosera is a JavaScript debugger for WebKit that can be used with any application that uses WebKit. Like the Web Inspector, over 90% of it is written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Web Inspector

Now, for the non-developers, this is pretty much a non-issue, but for me this is great. It supplies a readily available interface to find all kind of cool geeky things about the page you are viewing, such as the time it takes to load everything, the DOM structure, view the attributes of tags, view the Javascript errors and much, much more.

You do however need to enable it, tap these two commands into Terminal, then restart Safari:

  1. defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true
  1. defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitScriptDebuggerEnabled -bool true

I’m off to discover more Safari hidden wonders!

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User submitted comments

1 Buck wrote

13th April, 2008


I’ve been refusing to even try Safari since the Apple Update app tried to trick me into installing it. I should probably at least check that my html works correctly with it. :)

You can easily spend a lot of money on tools for IE that give you page load stats like that. http analyzer is cool though.

2 Christopher Hill wrote

13th April, 2008


I’ve been refusing to even try Safari since the Apple Update app tried to trick me into installing it. I should probably at least check that my html works correctly with it. :)

Yes, didn’t Apple bundle it with the Windows update app? To be honest I am not that big a fan of Safari on Windows—the design looks out of place.

You can easily spend a lot of money on tools for IE that give you page load stats like that. http analyzer is cool though.

Yes. I remember Microsoft launched the Web developer toolbar which was supposed to be similar to Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extension for Firefox.

3 Bay of Islands wrote

29th April, 2008


That’s a great tip, I agree completely - firebug in firefox is great but takes way longer to refresh (even a local) page than safari. Maybe v3 firefox will be better?

4 Christopher Hill wrote

30th April, 2008


I have been using Firefox 3 for a couple of weeks since b5 fixed a lot of bugs which was keeping me from switching. It’s great and am no longer using Safari.

Still nowhere near as fast as Safari though.

Penny for your thoughts

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