Firebug vs. Safari Javascript debugger

Question

[DISCLAIMER: My development machine is running OS X Tiger, so my question and experiences are specific to that. But I would not mind hearing feedback on Webkit for Windows.]

I've been a longtime Firebug user, but I've grown tired of it's twitchiness. I'm talking specifically about when it will not stop on breakpoints, lose the current line in the debugger pane, or slow execution to a crawl.

I briefly played around with the debugger in Safari's Web Inspector, and it just feels more solid.

Has anyone else switched to the Safari debugger? If so, were you glad you did? Are there any reasons I shouldn't consider it?

Answer 1

I recently started using the Safari debugger (on a WebKit nightly build, which will be about the same as the version now shipping with Safari 4) when Firebug was messing me around, and was absolutely delighted with it. Highly recommended.

Answer 2

First time I tried Safari's debugger (at least I think it was Safari--I was going through all the debuggers to see if they had caught up with FireFox) it made me so angry I haven't tried it since. IIRC, it shows arrays in alphabetical order:

a[0] "blah"
a[1] "blah"
a[10] "blah"
a[2] "blah"
a[3] "blah"
a[4] "blah"
a[5] "blah"
a[6] "blah"
a[7] "blah"
a[8] "blah"
a[9] "blah"

I changed from Bill Bixby into Lou Ferrigno when I saw that. Is that fixed yet?

Answer 3

I much prefer Safari's debugger to FireBug. I totally agree that it seems more solid.

The only thing I don't like about WebInspector in Safari is search. It takes ages for it to search. And to make matters worse, it insists on searching all the scripts that has been loaded instead of just the one you're looking at.

Anothter thing where WebInspector can't compete just yet is when it comes to inspecting dom-elements and changing styles on the fly. The times I need to play around with the css styles are more or less the only times I choose to use FireBug instead.