Why everyone should use Safari for rich web development

Micro-Optimizations are bad? That is just a load of shit.

If you can prove that Firefox's optimizations actually make incorrect results in any way, I am 100% behind whoever claims that micro optimizations are bad. However by firefox making them it means that I don't have to worry about the nitty gritty details about what order of instructions will perform better without changing the code. Or things like loop unrolling that don't have to be done in my checked in source.

Yea I think this argument is about 30 years too late...

If anything this proves FF3 is awesome.

Regarding web standards... As much as I am 100% for having good web standards, what good is adhering to a standard when no one can use it. I use the acid tests as an indication that browser x, y and z are browsers I want to be supporting. Unfortunately I always have to support IE... Sometimes even IE6, so acid tests are just nice-to-haves at this point. I just can't wait till IE7 completely dies (hopefully it won't be as long as IE6).

I use both Safari and Firefox for my web development. Safari's web inspector has a nicer user interface for javascript debugging, but Firebug has better support for editing CSS on the fly.

"Basically, if some HTML/CSS works on Safari, the chances are very high it will work on Firefox 2 and higher, and on IE 6 and higher (with minor tweaks)."

I don't get it. A lot of the hardship that comes with web development is that stuff that works great in modern standards-based browsers like Safari doesn't work when you try to view it in IE. I can't count the number of times I've taken a webpage that I developed to work in Safari (or Firefox) and seen it break completely in IE. And it often takes more than "minor tweaks" to fix it.

I really want to use Safari for debugging but every time I get down to trying to do so, I find some irritating hangup in terms of clunkiness and polish versus Firebug, and I end up heading right back to Firebug. Two things off the top of my head:

1) console output is just not as good as Firebug. Example: try going on jquery.com and doing console.log($("p")). Instead of a pretty printed array with styled items as in Firebug in the form of

, with all their classes and ids and visibility status hinted in the rendering, you get an expandable HTMLParagraphElement object (and its name doesn't even respond to a click..). If you expand that, the first thing you see is a big list of DOM constants like DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE: 11, etc. In Firebug these are sorted, filtered, censored to fit to the way web developers actually work.

2) I've never been able to resize the Console/Debugger when displayed as a split pane in the Windows version. In OS X, it seems to work, but in Windows, nothing. Again, a huge irritant when you're trying to get a better look at something that's gone wrong.

Nit picks? Yes. But some of us work with these things many hours a day. Workflow issues and missing little details like these prevent my uptake of the otherwise very impressive developer tools in Safari.

Indeed. Sounds very much backwards to me.

If anything, stuff developed to work with the restricted CSS-support in older MSIE versions (MSIE8 is actually not that bad) has a much higher chance of rendering correctly in Firefox, Opera and Safari than the other way around.