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Safari continues to have the best developer tools, so long as you don't need to debug JavaScript.


I use Safari for day-to-day web browsing and Chrome for development. Feels like the best of both worlds to me.


Same. Chrome dev tools, especially around JS are just better.


People have pointed out to what’s Obviously wrong with the JS tooling but I had more problems with CSS style sheets generated at runtime or web components attached stylesheets

They all work is just editing their styles that seems to be a pain, you straight up cannot edit a shared stylesheet attached to an web components elements shadow dom.

If you generate enough styles in JS you may not be to edit them correctly (as in it shed you the wrong styles for the element)


Safari's dev tools are ... just bad. They are frustratingly cumbersome to use: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764


I don't think JS debugging in Safari is that bad.

But I also use it as my main browser, so maybe there are some nicer features in other browser dev tools I haven't been exposed too.


It's mostly that there's no way for third-party tooling to initiate a debugging session, I believe.


That's fair.


It's criminally bad. You can't copy logged variables. You can't inspect worker threads (!?). WASM support is practically non-existant. You can't even do a heap snapshot on demand, something that should be a basic feature.

The timelines view is practically obfuscated with pretty graphs that show some aggregated data and some automatically generated snapshot points where the dev tools decide that are meaningful.

Inspecting the rendering pipeline is impossible. You can't see memory usage, compositing reasons, long frames (you kinda can but it's tricky)...

Not even going into remote debugging for iOS which crashes either the dev tools or Safari on iOS in any non-trivial scenario — the exact ones you need a debugger for.


That's fair, it sounds like you're dealing with some use cases I don't deal with often. And yeah remote debugging safari on an iPhone is pretty unreliable.


The Chrome tool where you can edit CSS inside the inspect panel and it writes it to the CSS file is amazing and I really miss that in Safari.




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