Drool. That’s the best word for how pretty and functional the new Web Inspector is.
Functionality-wise, it’s pretty much just an implementation of Firebug (as far as I can tell, I’m not a hardcore web developer), and that’s good for me. If there’s one thing Apple’s good at, it’s taking an existing good idea and polishing it with professional interaction and visual design. Something that other big software company (the one that pays my bills) could learn from.
UPDATE 3/9: Also, this context menu is killer. Most of the time I need Firebug, it’s to answer “hey, what’s the computed style of this thing I’m looking at.” In Safari, I can do that with a right-click:
Repeat after me: Mouse targets should be predictable. Labels should be readable. Seems obvious, right? Well, Safari disagrees on both counts. Today I decided to use Safari all day to see if they’ve made any improvements to the generelly-mediocre UX of the past several versions. Also, Firefox has been absurdly slow lately. After several hours, the most prominent issue is that of switching between tabs. I don’t have a ridiculous number of tabs open usually, but I’m still having a hell of a time navigating between them without pain. Why? Two reasons:
1. The Close button appears on mouseover, so in pointing to the tab, you have to remember that the left ~14 pixels are not where you want to click. Bad for two reasons: the user has to learn a pattern, with the penalty for not the frustration of closing exactly that tab you wanted and cutting into the already too-small tab label right when you really need that information.
2. The tabs resize dynamically. Therefore, there’s no way to predict exactly where that tab went, or what size the target for selecting it will be:
They’ve tried to solve this, but not effectively. Once you get past a certain number of tabs for the window size, you get a little ellipsis icon, and the remaining tabs end up in a menu. Not ideal, but not terrible either. However, with a modest number of tabs in a modestly-sized window, I get no such help:
Firefox (naturally) solves both these problems with little fuss, by keeping the tabs to a fixed size (easy to change with an extension) and showing arrows to horizontally scroll the tab list when there are too many to display comfortably.
“But, you can’t do that in Safari, since there’s no tab bar anymore!” I hear you say. Well, maybe it was a bad idea to get rid of the tab bar? I’ve read that Apple doesn’t do user testing before releasing things, and this is precisely why that’s shitty for their users. This is an obvious problem that would have been caught in the simplest working prototype, but instead we have to suffer with it in a released (albeit beta) product. Since it’s been released, though, it seems highly unlikely they’ll got back on the decision and change it for the final version. Which is really too bad. I love the speed of Safari, but the UX is just too much fail to use it every day.
Your faithful correspondent, J.D. Welch, has been a professional print, web & UI designer for ten years. Starting with PageMaker version 3 in the early nineties, he has worked in media ranging from student newspapers to sprawling desktop applications to magazine ads to websites for nonprofits.
