Misguided usability “feature” in Safari

Finding it necessary to test some features of a web application using Safari, I dutifully downloaded the Windows version and installed it. Upon launch I was greeted with this gaudy home page shown here on the right. Now maybe some people enjoy the tackiness of a supermarket tabloid emblazoned with color and too many things going on at once. In fairness, Apple’s start page is no worse than Microsoft’s MSN property. In all the years of using IE and Microsoft attempting to shove their noisy, bulked up on steroids homepage under foot as the welcome doormat, I’ve dutifully avoided it and set my startup page to Google’s minimalist starting point. To me it’s like the difference between opening my front door and stepping out onto a quiet, country scene or stepping out onto the sidewalk of the Las Vegas strip – to each his or her own.

However, when I attempted to switch my home page over to Google I was jarred with this unexpected dialog from those brilliant minds at Apple. How do I put this gently? WTF?!?! What does setting my home page have to do with using the search bar? Don’t they get it? Let me put it to them plainly – I can’t stand your lousy home page and hope to never see it again.

After reflecting for a moment it occurred to me there’s some nefarious programming going on here. It wasn’t a case of them whining about not using their home page, THEY EXPLICITELY CHECKED FOR AND ATTEMPTED TO STOP ME FROM USING GOOGLE AS MY HOMEPAGE!!! They also deflected the issue by directing me to the search bar as though it was a matter of searching. Firefox doesn’t do this. Internet Explorer doesn’t do this. I’m guessing that Opera doesn’t either although I haven’t tried Opera.

It dawned on my that they made an intentional decision to write code that would check if I was switching my home page to Google’s and attempt to warn me off. Someone actually thought up this “feature”, added it to the development tasks, assigned it to a developer to code, wrote a test plan for QA to verify the “feature”, informed the localization team so that it could be translated into however many languages the browser supports and shipped it! How many man-hours of production costs went into this “feature”?

Um…maybe the Apple team (and the users of the software) would be better served by more useful features like a simple, easy way to debug JavaScript instead of this. Today being April 15th in the U.S. I thought it was apropos to mention this little additional “line item” in the Apple Tax.

Technorati Tags: apple,safari,google

Debugging Safari on Windows

Truthfully, I had strongly considered titling this post “Drive by blogging” as a nod to a drive by shooting or “Blog rage” in deference to road rage because that’s how I felt this morning. I briefly considered “Why Safari sucks” as well. The fact is that compared to debugging under Internet Explorer or Firefox, Safari is still in the dark ages.

Searching for “Safari debug JavaScript” easily turns up secret incantations for enabling the hidden Developer’s menu and you think you’re onto something only to be let down. Okay, that’s not totally fair – apparently you had to hunt for preferences and edit an XML file or type in an undocumented command string but now it’s found on the Edit | Preferences dialog under the Advanced “section” (or is that “tab” or “button” in Apple-speak – hard to tell with that non-intuitive dialog).

With the “Show Develop menu in menu bar” checked, you’ll be briefly pleased at the shiny new menu shown here on the left. I’ve highlighted the most promising options. Web Inspector is a nice little DOM inspector and even shows the JavaScript files currently loaded – same as Firefox/Firebug and IE/DeveloperTools. The Error Console is pretty standard and the Network Timeline is a very nice feature.

My issue with all this glitz is that IT’S FREAKIN’ NEAR USELESS!!! You can’t *DEBUG* JavaScript in a way that is considered modern, standard practice today. Unlike Internet Explorer with it’s developer add-in or Firefox’ Firebug add-in, you can’t set breakpoints and step through code, nor can you inspect variable values nor see a call stack to figure out where you’ve come from.

In fact, the above mentioned search yields as its number one result the Safari Developer FAQ which specifically answers the question - it’s #14 on the FAQ list. I’ll quote a bit of it here: “Safari 1.3 and above supports explicit logging of arbitrary information … by using window.console.log() in your JavaScript. All messages are routed to the JavaScript Console window and show up nicely in a dark green, to easily differentiate themselves from JavaScript exceptions.”

Gee, it bring tears to my eyes to think that 25 years ago when I first started programming in RPG II and Cobol-74 on IBM systems I could carefully insert debug logging code into my program and observe the values of variables when I re-ran the program and managed to bring it to the same state it was in that caused me to consider there’s a bug in there somewhere. It’s really great to know that the Apple team hasn’t strayed too far from the tried and true basics that have worked for so long. No wonder Safari is such a distant third in the browser market with the rest of the niche players – developers HATE working with it!!

On to my real gripe – if you really dig hard, you’ll come across the WebKit underneath Safari with instructions on how to build and debug it. There’s two itsy, bitsy things they don’t tell you in the Windows instructions…

1. If you already have Cygwin for other things, forget about it. Rip it out and install their customized version mentioned in step 3. They’re not explicit about that and you will waste time otherwise. While I applaud them for making it somewhat turnkey, at least point out that they’ve got a custom configured version and that it’s the only way you’ll get it to work. Their wiki has a link to the “list” of packages (really just a pointer to the Perl source for the installer) but adding those packages to an existing Cygwin install still doesn’t work.
2. The second dirty little secret they forgot to spell out…you *MUST* download the source under your home directory, e.g. /cygwin/home/<username>/WebKit. So /WebKit or /Src/WebKit, or /Repo/WebKit …none of these are allowed – there’s only one path structure that will work and it’s theirs. There’s plenty of path references inside their Perl scripts that assume this directory structure and will only work properly with it. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but I do have a problem with them not taking the extra minute to point this out clearly so as not to waste the time of others.

If you make either of these mistakes (or both, as I did) you will waste a lot of time and effort chasing missing things, strange error messages, and generally getting frustrated. Welcome to the wonderful world of free, open source projects – you get what you pay for…nothing!

Now on to debugging a JavaScript library that works beautifully under Internet Explorer and Firefox but not so much under he-who-must-not-be-named-browser.

 

P.S. Did you catch the hidden message? If you want to debug JavaScript running in Safari you need to download the source code for the browser, configure a proper build environment, then run the browser in the debugger. Ooh-rah! Only way to be productive.