I've used Safari daily for … must be 20 years now? Every day, for everything, minus the odd exceptionally rare circumstance. And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago.
I'm a web developer. I use its devtools constantly.
People ask why do you use Safari and not Chrome and I think the question is backwards. Why, given how lovely Safari is, would you go and download Chrome? It's really ugly and doesn't look like any of the other apps on my Mac.
When I do want other devtools, I vastly prefer Firefox's to Chrome's.
Safari's dev tools are infuriatingly cumbersome in comparison to Chrome. They go out of their way to make even the simplest actions hidden in multiple selects and popup menus. I even made a screencast of it: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764
It's criminally bad. You can't copy logged variables. You can't inspect worker threads (!?). WASM support is laughable. You can't even do a heap snapshot on demand.
It's so good to see Safari steadily making progress on being a decent browser.
I guess the snark is funny, so I'll bite.
I've used Safari daily for … must be 20 years now? Every day, for everything, minus the odd exceptionally rare circumstance. And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago.
I'm a web developer. I use its devtools constantly.
People ask why do you use Safari and not Chrome and I think the question is backwards. Why, given how lovely Safari is, would you go and download Chrome? It's really ugly and doesn't look like any of the other apps on my Mac.
When I do want other devtools, I vastly prefer Firefox's to Chrome's.
I don’t think the common question is “Why not use Chrome instead of Safari?” but “Why use Safari?”
Safari's dev tools are infuriatingly cumbersome in comparison to Chrome. They go out of their way to make even the simplest actions hidden in multiple selects and popup menus. I even made a screencast of it: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764
As a browser? I agree with you.
Safari continues to have the best developer tools, so long as you don't need to debug JavaScript.
I use Safari for day-to-day web browsing and Chrome for development. Feels like the best of both worlds to me.
Same. Chrome dev tools, especially around JS are just better.
I don't think JS debugging in Safari is that bad.
But I also use it as my main browser, so maybe there are some nicer features in other browser dev tools I haven't been exposed too.
It's mostly that there's no way for third-party tooling to initiate a debugging session, I believe.
That's fair.
It's criminally bad. You can't copy logged variables. You can't inspect worker threads (!?). WASM support is laughable. You can't even do a heap snapshot on demand.
The Chrome tool where you can edit CSS inside the inspect panel and it writes it to the CSS file is amazing and I really miss that in Safari.