Comments on: WebKit’s New Element Inspector

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 06:45:33 +0000

Firebug also has much more advanced Javascript debugging features, which WebKit has some of in Drosera, which I hope will be integrated with WebKit / Web Inspector more closely.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 23:53:01 +0000

Webkit inspector is very much, albeit with fewer features, a clone of Firebug which is the preeminent web developers friend in Firefox. Two major advantage that firebug has over webkit inspector is the ability to edit styles in-line and see them applied to the whole page and the ability to dynamically display changes to the DOM as they happen. I think that it is a good thing that WKI is copies Firebug so closely. Now I only need to learn one tool to do debugging in two different browsers. I look forward to WKI's continuing evolution.

By: Zac

Zac — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 18:48:00 +0000

What I would be wholeheartedl for is them simply opening up hooks in the Inspector to allow people to get/inject new CSS.

Then you could inspect an element and open just that CSS in CSS Edit or Coda and update it

That might be interesting.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 17:03:13 +0000

Zac: I don’t really see it as bulking up, but I take your point. I think when something reads and displays something beautifully, it’s a natural extension to expect it should be able to write it, too.

By: Zac

Zac — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:57:08 +0000

CSS Edit (http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/) does allow you to edit the CSS code of a website in the application. Its quite simple to get it to preview a page and then start to edit the CSS code in CSS Edit to see effective live updates as you edit the code.

It not the same as you are suggesting but I would rather have this sort of functionality in a full CSS editor than see it in a DOM inspector.

Bulking up utilities like that seems to be a Windows sort of thing to do.

By: Josh Monroe

Josh Monroe — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:26:56 +0000

So, how about this, CSSEdit uses webkit, if you just tell CSSEdit to use the nightly, you can use the web inspector in CSSEdit’s Preview window. This means that you can have it all in one app. Although not in one screen. I suppose if there is the functionality to get this information out of webkit to display then, MacRabbit, could also whip up the functionality to show what properties have been overridden.

By: Jens Ayton

Jens Ayton — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:46:39 +0000

Y’know, all those drop shadows/glows on the text is just showing off. :-)

Ryan, you can run a WebKit nightly side by side with the release version of Safari (2.x or 3 beta). Unlike the beta, the nightlies do not replace WebKit for other apps by default.

By: ssp

ssp — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:54:21 +0000

I thought the old Web Kit Inspector was quite impressive (and tremendously useful) already. But this bests it again. The only advantage of the old inspector is its size. While the MacBook’s screen isn’t exactly small, using this inspector while viewing a reasonable part of a page and hopefully seeing some text editor windows as well is ‘tricky’ at least.

By: Ryan Ballantyne

Ryan Ballantyne — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:28:09 +0000

Forgive me for a bit of lazyness in not checking this out for myself…how does it compare to Firebug? I’ve held out on using the WebKit nightlies simply because I want to develop against the current release version rather than a future version that may be subject to change.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 21:31:50 +0000

I would tend to consider the degree of support that is likely to go into the UI Inspector as falling far short of what is available in CSSEdit, or any other such 3rd party products. Think of it more like the support for RSS in Safari. It's really awesome to have it available *everywhere* for free, even though it's clearly worth spending the extra money for NetNewsWire and have a better complete experience with syndication. In general the software industry is about an ever evolving level of "commodity" functionality, on which the salable products are built. Consider WebKit itself which itself makes "HTML rendering" a commodity enterprise, while leaving the door still wide open for competition in the complete browser experience.