New Safari developer tools provide insight into CSS Grid Lanes
webkit.org72 points by feross 11 hours ago
72 points by feross 11 hours ago
Safari is a fine browser, just as Firefox and Chrome are [0].
Regarding CSS Grid Lanes, I find it to be a better name than "masonry".
I'm not sure how often I'd actually reach for grid lanes, but I guess not often.
What good use cases would you see for grid lanes today?
[0]: <out of topic>If anything, Chrome is the new IE: is a monopoly imposing its quirks and "standards" on others.</out of topic>
It's so good to see Safari steadily making progress on being a decent browser.
I guess the snark is funny, so I'll bite.
I've used Safari daily for … must be 20 years now? Every day, for everything, minus the odd exceptionally rare circumstance. And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago.
I'm a web developer. I use its devtools constantly.
People ask why do you use Safari and not Chrome and I think the question is backwards. Why, given how lovely Safari is, would you go and download Chrome? It's really ugly and doesn't look like any of the other apps on my Mac.
When I do want other devtools, I vastly prefer Firefox's to Chrome's.
I'll join in saying I also daily Safari for generale usage (with only two extensions installed 1Blocker and Are.na) and I have basically zero issues.
I also do dev work in Firefox + Safari. I use Firefox mainly because I prefer their dev tools to do frontend work. Chrome I almost never use. This insistence that Safari is the new IE is honestly baffling. Yes Safari is not perfect and yes Apple is Apple. Still, Safari is far from being a train wreck.
I find Safari's devtools to be quite annoying, but to each their own. Firefox' dev tools still hold the crown for me.
The lack of cross-platform support is also annoying to the point where I generally don't bother testing on Safari unless I'm absolutely forced to. Until Apple releases a Safari build for Windows and/or Linux, Safari users will just have to rely on Safari's compatibility with cross-platform browsers.
The open source version of WebKit works fine as a user, but behaves differently from any official Safari releases, so as a web developer it's not really usable as a testing tool.
Orion , a web browser using the same engine that Safari, are to going to release a version for Linux. I'm expeting to get it so I could test stuff on something Safari like.
I also use Safari as my main browser, but do have some gripes.
The one that bites me every day is how I cannot pick an arbitrary search engine. The ones they have are very few and awful.
One that bites me on occasion is the inability to selectively disable JavaScript per website.
Another is the atrocious permissions management for extensions. On iOS you can’t even deny access to a specific website until you allow it once first.
One that bites me rarely is AppleScript support being slightly worse than in Chromium, specifically there being no way (other than GUI automation) to make a new Private Window.
One that hasn’t bitten me yet is the ugly pill-shaped tabs in Tahoe, together with the removal of the unified tab layout.
The most frustrating part is these are very easy to fix. Note also that this isn’t an endorsement of Chromium, there’s a reason those browsers aren’t my main. Right now there isn’t a single web browser I like and that does everything I want acceptably. But Safari is the least bad.
> why do you use Safari and not Chrome
To me, it's annoying people ask that question. It's like they ask why I use brand A of shoes and not B, but it's my choice and nobody would expect a monopoly from an Ad company to be a good thing.
Social pressure is real, though.
The reason to use Chrome is better extension support, better/more useful functionalities (translation, favicon bookmarks, Google Lens), better autofill/autologin, and better performance for web apps generally. Another very useful property is being able to sync your Chrome profile on any computer, which comes in very handy when you need to do stuff on computers you do not own. Doing the same with Safari is possible but a hassle.
I have used Safari since it replace Internet Explorer back in the days, then switched to Chrome a few years ago after a beta broke password syncing and AdBlocker Extensions for Safari were paid/not as good.
Like much of Apple's software, it has strengths and looks good but is really lacking in many ways. It also locks you into the walled garden pretty tight, which can be annoying at times.
Apple should go back to releasing a cross-platform version if they want to be taken seriously, in my opinion. In general, their incentive to build software solely for their platform is a double-edged sword because they can't manage to create hardware that can cover every need (especially for 3D/engineering), and it becomes very annoying to rely on it the moment you need to use another OS (either Windows or Linux).
Another example is Apple Notes being decent, but using it in the web browser is basically a joke (might as well not exist).
Safari has translation, bookmarks (favorites bar) can be either icon only, text only, or both text and icon at the same time, tabs can be pinned (Chrome also has it), "better" autofill/autologin is subjective. Chrome doesn't have better performance than Safari, both on macOS and iOS Safari is optimized better, both for battery and memory.
If you use Google products extensively and don't use Apple ecosystem integration features, then Chrome may look like it has better features; the same is true if you are on the Apple ecosystem (Notes, Reminders, Calendar, Passwords, multiple devices, etc). Seamless integration of Apple devices is one of the biggest advantages of using Apple software like Safari, where you can use iCloud Tabs to switch between devices. Also, Tab Groups is a neat feature; you can move Safari windows to an iPad with Sidecar and so on.
Google's ecosystem also has similar features, but you can argue that you're "locked into a walled garden pretty tight" with Google as well.
Browsers have their different advantages, but they are not so different from each other, especially when we compare Safari and Chrome. Maybe the only real difference is that Chrome has way more extensions.
> and better performance for web apps generally
At which cost? Huge RAM footprint, deadly battery killer, slow start time. How often do you need heavy performance for web apps versus just browsing?
Since MV3 Chrome has not had better extension API support, although Apple’s insistence on publishing them on the App Store means availability is still restricted. I’ve found that using `xcrun safari-web-extension-converter` on almost any Chrome extension works fine and I’ve self-signed a few (eg. Bypass Paywalls Clean) with Xcode to run on my Mac and iPhone.
> Apple’s insistence on publishing them on the App Store means availability is still restricted.
This is not true. You can distribute Safari extensions outside the Mac App Store.
While it's true that you can't distribute Safari extensions outside the iOS App Store, mobile Chrome doesn't even have extension support, so in this case, Safari has vastly better extension support.
You do still need to notarise it with an Apple Developer membership, right? Else you have to enable unsigned extensions every time you open Safari. The cost barrier is still there even if the approval barrier isn’t.
Yes, but your initial comment was kind of a strange way to phrase a cost complaint. After all, Google insists that extensions be published in the Chrome Web Store, and that requires Google's approval, a process that can often take much longer than App Store approval.
I suspect that the difference in extension availability is mostly due to desktop market share, since Safari is nonexistent on Windows and Linux.
This is like being in the 2000s and saying "Why would I use anything but IE5, everything works with it"
The market share is what makes those circumstances exceptionally rare. Meanwhile we're having to use safari specific fixes and refrain from using he newest standards just because of safari
Where "newest standars" are inevitably "Chrome-only non-standards".
Safari is not just fine. It's more than fine: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable
Safari's dev tools are infuriatingly cumbersome in comparison to Chrome. They go out of their way to make even the simplest actions hidden in multiple selects and popup menus. I even made a screencast of it: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764
As a browser? I agree with you.
I don’t think the common question is “Why not use Chrome instead of Safari?” but “Why use Safari?”
I have colleagues who are annoyed that I use Firefox because in their world everything Chrome does is standard and browsers like Safari and Firefox are annoying outliers. No matter if something they have implemented in Chrome is _actually_ standard and no matter how proper to the spec non-Chrome browsers implement a feature they see it as a chore to support the spec rather than the Chrome browser.
So, the "Why not use Chrome instead of Safari?” certainly happens.
I wish they would fix the bug that has plagued testing against Safari for larger applications since day 1: the silent memory restart. At the very least give an error indicating why the page just refreshed so users/testers can report it, but it would honestly be best to just let a modern desktop browser use the available memory if desired.
Have a pat on the head, Safari.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Safari's dev tools are ... just bad. They are frustratingly cumbersome to use: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764