Surfin' Safari too

Back in July of 07, I blogged about Safari’s excellent web rendering. Although I’m a fairly ’committed’ (in both senses of the word) Firefox user, I thought Apple did a pretty good job of rendering in Safari. At the time, I also had some complaints about Safari, such as it wasn’t a well behaved “Windows” application. For example, for your convenience, you had to move your cursor to the lower right corner to resize Safari. Gosh, thanks for that, Apple, that’s an awful lot of extra mouse movement. But I’m glad to say that has been fixed; even iTunes behaves properly. At least on this particular issue. Don’t get me started on my other iTunes complaints.

Recently I was helping do some development on a Firefox userstyle for Gmail and had some pretty hairy CSS to dig through. In case you are wondering by the way, Google Apps email and GMAIL are only about 99% the same code. They actually are different from each other. But I digress; for those who don’t use Firefox or don’t know about userstyles, you can use an extension called, Stylish to fix…I mean augment or curtail the look and even featuresof any website. In fact, most popular websites already have a library of changes made by other users that you can add quite easily if you aren’t a CSS guru. Definately worth checking out.

Anyhoo, what I found really interesting is the Web inspector that comes with Safari. Though introduced in 2006, I had never noticed Safari’s Web Inspector. Usually I only use Safari to test content that I’m working on like my website, an eBay listing, etc. I don’t generally use Safari for Webdevelopment much. But I have to say, I found it quite nice. Though not as advanced as Firefox’s DOM insprector, there is an elligance to Safari’s Web Inspector. As usual, even the name Apple choose is nice.

I don’t think Safari will replace Firefox on my desktop anytime soon, but proves to be a bit more than just a pretty face. Now if Apple could just make it a bit more robust; at least on Windows. I know, poor Apple will tell you that is because it is just so confusing to write software for Windows. At lest that’s what their latest commercial, "Breakthrough" would lead you to believe. Sounds more like this is a confession of Apple developers than anything else to me, but I admire their frankness. Even so, the first step is accepting responsibility, and not projecting blame on others. :)

Update: I completely forgot about a very useful extension called, Firebug.If you haven’t used Firebug, you owe it to yourself to try it. It does a lot of what Safari's Web Inspector does and a lot more. True, it doesn't have quite as much panache in some cosmetic ways, but it is a must-have tool for anyone working on web development. Shame on me for forgetting about Firebug.

Digg this!

;; De.icio.us