DOM Inspector in Safari : Software : Brand Spanking New

DOM Inspector in Safari

Posted on January 18, 2006

The team working on the apple webkit have added a new feature that's sure to be welcomed by webdevelopers/designers working on Mac OS X - the Web Inspector Panel. It's similar to the DOM Inspector in Firefox. Here's a screenshot. Here's how to get it:

Download the nightly build.
Type the following into a terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.Safari \ WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

You should then see a contextual menu item on every page in safari. More info here

Comments (5)

Mark Rowe said

Slight correction: the second step is not required for the nightly builds. The shiny gold WebKit.app takes care of enabling the Web Inspector when it is run. You simply need to download and run! It couldn't get any easier ;-)

Posted by: Mark Rowe at January 19, 2006 05:30 AM .

bsn said

ok. you got me. that's what comes from writing an entry before testing it yourself!

Posted by: bsn at January 19, 2006 09:36 AM .

barry said

this sounds really useful but it doesnt seem to work for me. I launch the nightly, navigate to my site but I dont see the dom inspector window....am i missing something?

Posted by: barry at January 28, 2006 10:57 PM .

bsn said

The context menu item is called "Inspect Element".

Posted by: bsn at February 2, 2006 08:36 AM .

brian said

Ok, maybe it's just be, but I downloaded this (for windows). Am I just supposed to run the "run-nightly-webkit.cmd" file and that's it? I don't see the Inspect Element in my context menu. I know it's not super important my sites get seen in Safari for Windows, but I would imagine any problems I fix in this will hopefully fix them for OS X, which I can't test on.

On a side note, do you supposed web developers try to test things in all browsers simply because browser statistics say people are using that browser, however, could it be that the statistics report that because web developers hurry up to download every browser in existance, and all the testing they do on live sites is what results in the browser statistics? Just a thought.

Posted by: brian at July 21, 2007 08:25 PM .

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