Firebug vs Safari Web Inspector

It would be nice if Apple would release an update for Safari that addresses the issue of the broken Web Inspector, that they broke. It used to be, if you had developer tools enabled in Safari, when you right click on something and then click “Inspect Element”, Safari would do basically the same thing that Firebug for Firefox does. It brings up a little inspector at the bottom of the page for you to view an organized outline of all the content on the page and the source code that puts it there.

Well, Apple released an update for Safari that makes the Web Inspector pop up in a separate window every time you go to inspect an element. This is very annoying behavior and should’ve been fixed by now. The only thing that I could think of, is that this is probably going to be yet another thing that they break in one operating system and don’t release a fix for unless you update to their latest OS. Like they did when they broke the Wikipedia feature of their Dictionary application in Leopard and only released a fix for it in Snow Leopard. I’m speaking of the issue in Dictionary when you look up a word and click the Wikipedia tab in Dictionary, you only see the top of the Wiki page, with no way to scroll down except by clicking and dragging the mouse down the bottom edge of the window. Very annoying behavior that Apple never bothered to fix in Leopard. And no, Wikipedia isn’t to blame for breaking this feature. If they are, how come it works in Snow Leopard but not in Leopard? Even trying to use a tip never did fix the issue for me.

Currently, when using either Google Chrome or Firefox with their Firebug plugin, this isn’t an issue in either one of those browsers. So, a big thank you to those developers for keeping an eye on this and not letting it become an issue. I don’t know if you’ve ever used any of these things before, but for a web developer/designer, having to click the button that says “Dock to main window” every time you want to inspect something on a web page, can be very monotonous.

I find myself using Google Chrome more and more lately, given this handicap feature of Safari Web Inspector, and the fact that there are basically no plugins for Safari that have to do with Google Plus. I guess we can all just sit back and give a big shout out to open source.