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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

What saddens me[1] is how horribly hopeless Safari's Developer Tools are. They are basically unusable at this point. Every month Chrome adds more capabilities to their dev tools than Safari in a whole year.

[1] It's been saddening (is this a word?) me for over six years now. Safari's dev tools were best in class, and then they never really improved. The UI was updated once or twice, each time making the UX considerably worse. People may complain about how Apple doesn't care about pro market anymore, but the writing has been on the wall for some time now, and the first canary in the coal mine was Safari.

BTW. If you're interested, go to Develop -> Enter responsive mode. And then go Develop -> Show web inspector. Good luck working with the unzoomable screen. The first time I saw it, I had to go outside and walk for a bit.

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The DevTools have actually improved considerably. It seemed to be the major focus in several recent releases, at least by the length of the respective sections in change notes.

I have changed from Chrome-only development to using both, since they have individual strengths. Safari has pretty good tools in the battery and performance profiling, for example.

Luckily they are working on it: https://twitter.com/JosephPecoraro/status/110893441454786150...

> If you're interested, go to Develop -> Enter responsive mode. And then go Develop -> Show web inspector. Good luck working with the unzoomable screen. The first time I saw it, I had to go outside and walk for a bit.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to point out?

I think they're pointing out that when the web console is docked on the bottom (default), the responsive viewport is shrunk since it's scaled by window.innerHeight with no way (afaict) to zoom independently. At least I couldn't figure out how.

https://i.imgur.com/avAHd0l.jpg

I think I found a bug: docking the web console vertically while in responsive mode hides the top row of controls. For example there's no button to dock horizontally. (Edit: actually this was just fixed after updating Safari)

https://i.imgur.com/XOP43hs.jpg

I think I found a bug: docking the web console vertically while in responsive mode hides the top row of controls. For example there's no button to dock horizontally.

Yep. I ran into this a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was something wonky with my machine and rebooted to make sure.

My primary audiences on a couple of projects are IE11 and Safari. Sucks to be me.

Appears to be fixed in 12.1

Yeah, realized I hadn't even updated my OS/Safari when I wrote that post, spent the last 30min doing so, and the latter issue has been fixed.

This annoying bug was fixed in the recent preview releases, IIRC.

I think this.

https://imgur.com/a/SgWuxWq

If you enter the responsive design pseudo-device simulator mode, you are automatically scaled if the virtual viewport is bigger than Safari's master viewport. Which, yeah, slightly annoying, but it's never caused me to rage walk. (Generally I'm using this to look at a teeeeeny little iPhone SE viewport.)

Is nobody aware that you can pop the web inspector out into its own window?

It's not going to make me storm out of the room but juggling multiple browser windows (and really, multiple windows of any app) has never been palatable to me.

The annoying dance of alt-tab alt-tilde over and over, god forbid you have more than one dev tool window open or another browser window like Postman open.

You should simply be able to scale a viewport independently of the chrome.

Or get a 4K monitor. With one it seems absurd to have dev tools docked. Why would you want to do that when you can see 2160 vertical pixels (minus chrome)? Always good to know if that footer is sticky.

> Or get a 4K monitor.

“You’re holding it wrong”

Everyone is aware. It's much more convenient to have it docked.

A mild inconvenience doesn't normally cause one to take a rage-walk.

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