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In my last post I outlined some of the benefits of Safari in your day to day browsing. Today I'm going to highlight a lesser-known feature of Safari that might just be the first step in considering Safari for web development as well.
In my opinion, the single biggest barrier to using Safari in the web development profession is its lack of the Firebug extension. If you haven't heard of it already, Firebug is a tool for browsing and manipulating the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript of any web page, on the fly. This, as you could imagine is an invaluable tool for us developers. I can honestly say that Firebug cuts my development time in half (or maybe more).
So how about Firebug for Safari? It doesn't exist. Or does it?
Enter Safari's 'Web Inspector'. This tool, packaged with Safari attempts to fill the void for developers. Enabling the tool on your installation of Safari requires modifying the advanced preferences. An easy way to do this is by opening your terminal, and typing or pasting the following:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true
Once enabled, the Web Inspector can be activated by right clicking anywhere on a web page and selecting 'Inspect Element', or by using the keyboard shortcut
⌥⌘I
Users of Firebug will feel right at home in the Web Inspectors UI. You will see the familiar columned layout displaying the DOM hierarchy on the left, and the CSS rules for the selected node on the right. With closer inspection one will find a wealth of important functionality such as a Metrics pane, which provides a visual representation of the margins, borders and padding affecting the currently selected node, as well as various HTML and JavaScript properties, including class names, offsetWidth/Height, and parent/sibling information.
There are many more in depth features of this excellent tool which I will save for a later post, but hopefully this has given an idea of what is possible. I encourage all developers to give Safari's Web Inspector a try, if only to give you a relative comparison of Firebug.
I'm not sure about the general public but for some reason after my somewhat recent upgrade to OSX Snow Leopard - Flash on Firefox just isn't working. In my usual browsing, my Firefox app hangs probably 2-3 times per day, on average. This is all due to Flash elements loading in the page. I've tirelessly searched online for answers, only to find endless threads commending Snow Leopard on being leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessors in terms of speed and reliability. Unfortunately this has not been my experience.
Luckily, I've found a solution. Maybe not one you would expect..
I love Firefox. I'll be the first to recommend Firefox to my friends, family, clients, and co-workers due to its speed, standards compliance, and overall great extension support. When it comes to building a web site, nothing can beat the powerful tools available such as Firebug, Colorzilla, and the Web Developer Toolbar, to name a few. It is in fact the one and only browser I turn to for html and css web development. That being said, I have now almost completely switched over to Safari for my day to day personal browsing.
Don't get me wrong I still enjoy working with Firefox, but for simple no frills browsing on a Mac, Safari is faster. Period.
I now see pages load instantly. Flash advertisements used to add 2-3 seconds to a page's load time. I now see the content immediately without waiting for the flash to load. Maybe this has something to do with the order in which the browsers load certain content, I'm not sure. Whatever the case, over the course of a day it saves me a significant amount of time.
Safari may not be for everyone, but for you diehard Firefox users who might not have considered it before, give it a try. It may just give you the little bump in performance you were looking for.
It's been a while since our last post....shame on us :)
We are currently hard at work with several interesting web projects. We've had the pleasure of meeting fantastic new contacts in the web industry as well as some awesome clients.
We're also looking at some of the cool advancements with Drupal 7. Looks like it's shaping up to be truly epic.
Well the day has come to finally reveal the site! We're super excited to launch deckfifty.com Have a look at the complete list of web services we offer.
We've been working hard to get the site finished and ready for launch. It's been going really well and we're very excited to finally reveal it. We hope to have it completed in the next day or two. There will probably be a few smaller changes post-launch but we nearly have the bulk of the development finished!