Our JS life just got a whole lot worse :(

[dd]

"Apple has launched a version of its web browser Safari for Windows"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6742439.stm

As if having Safari exist on the Mac wasn't bad enough,
now we have to deal with it on Windows too :-( Oh joy,
we have the delights of having to support the worst browser
in the world on the Windows platform also.

 

[VK]

"Apple has launched a version of its web browser Safari for Windows"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6742439.stm

As if having Safari exist on the Mac wasn't bad enough,
now we have to deal with it on Windows too :-( Oh joy,
we have the delights of having to support the worst browser
in the world on the Windows platform also.

I don't think it is so bad
First of all, Safari is not so much used on MacOS itself, and MacOS
holds only 2%-5% by regions of the market share: with the traditional
local usage increase in Japan.
Taking into account numerous bugs and missing features of this
browser, I can hardly imagine it taking by storm Windows platforms
Safari is based on open source WebKit, so theoretically any specialist
may port it onto Windows. Some attempts were made over the last years,
but all of them ended up on 0.x hardly usable kappa versions. That
made the hard destiny of Safari even more harder, because it was
effectively excluded worldwide from the compatibility testing. While
big company sure can buy a test Mac, small developers will not buy
another - and very expensive - computer just to test their pages. I
guess Apple finally realized that damn thing are they doing to
themselves, so they trying to change it. I just hope they will not be
so stupid to charge for.

 

[Andrew Poulos]

"Apple has launched a version of its web browser Safari for Windows"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6742439.stm

As if having Safari exist on the Mac wasn't bad enough,
now we have to deal with it on Windows too :-( Oh joy,
we have the delights of having to support the worst browser
in the world on the Windows platform also.

I just tested one of the elearning web sites that we have. In it the
user clicks a button to open a new window with some additional resources
via a cal to window.open, and it fails without warning.

The popup blocker is disabled yet still no window. IE 5.5+, FF 1+ and
Opera 9+ do open the resource window.

I realise that Safari for Windows is in beta but is there a javascript
degbugger available?

Andrew Poulos

 

[RobG]

I don't think it is so bad
First of all, Safari is not so much used on MacOS itself,

If you trust web site statistics at all, then it is used by about half
of Mac users, which is more than "not so much". I suspect that a good
percentage of those using Mac OS and not Safari are using a version
prior to 10.3. Users with say an old eMac running OS X 10.2.8 and
Firefox 1.5 probably see no reason at all to upgrade.


[...]

I can hardly imagine it taking by storm Windows platforms

I don't think Apple have any delusions about being the #1 browser on
windows. Steve Jobs has been saying for years that for Apple to win
(i.e. be successful), Microsoft doesn't have to lose.

I think Apple's primary goal is to make their browser more available
to Windows users. A secondary consideration is to provide a way for
web developers to test their sites with Safari. I don't think the
cost of an old Mac and latest version of OS X was a consideration,
much more the inconvenience of having to use a separate machine for
testing. Now developers can run IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, whatever
all at once on their dev box, as can testers. Considering Safari is
far more standards compliant than IE (as are Firefox, Opera, et al),
that can only be a good thing.

Maybe we'll even see an end to sites that use browser sniffing to load
CSS and script files... (not likely)

 

[Lee]

VK said:

I don't think it is so bad
First of all, Safari is not so much used on MacOS itself, and MacOS
holds only 2%-5% by regions of the market share: with the traditional
local usage increase in Japan.
Taking into account numerous bugs and missing features of this
browser, I can hardly imagine it taking by storm Windows platforms
Safari is based on open source WebKit, so theoretically any specialist
may port it onto Windows. Some attempts were made over the last years,
but all of them ended up on 0.x hardly usable kappa versions. That
made the hard destiny of Safari even more harder, because it was
effectively excluded worldwide from the compatibility testing. While
big company sure can buy a test Mac, small developers will not buy
another - and very expensive - computer just to test their pages. I
guess Apple finally realized that damn thing are they doing to
themselves, so they trying to change it.

I assume the new iPhone uses the Safari engine (as do the Nintendo
DS Lite and the Wii, by the way). I'll bet Apple prefers that the browser
is available to most web developers.


--

 

[Andrew Vit]

I realise that Safari for Windows is in beta but is there a javascript
degbugger available?

WebKit provides a debugger called Drosera:

http://webkit.org/blog/?p=61

However, I don't know if this is available for Windows. If Apple's
rationale is to get developers on board for the iPhone, then it
doesn't make sense that they wouldn't provide the tools for it. Maybe
they will release the debugger for Windows at some point.

This is a good take on yesterday's announcements by the way:

http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wwdc_2007_keynote

--Andrew Vit
[Posted to Google Groups from Safari 3.0b on Mac.]

 

[dd]

--Andrew Vit
[Posted to Google Groups from Safari 3.0b on Mac.]

Do you by any chance know how to enable the Debug menu on Win/Safari ?
On the Mac they have a console command to do it.

 

[dd]

I don't think it is so bad

Oh it is so bad. It's the least developer friendly browser available.
IE allows us to debug with visual studio (or the
lite script debugger they offer). Netscape 6/7 had Venkman
(which sucked, but it was something). Firefox gives us the
always improving Firebug. Safari - Nothing !! They have Drosera
that allegedly works with Webkit, but Webkit is not Safari. I
don't think I want to be downloading a nightly build of Safari
and having to build it myself to debug a web page.

Without a debugger we're left to putting in alerts. How 1994 is
that? Safari doesn't even offer a JavaScript console by default,
and the one it does offer (if you know how to enable it) is
total garbage.

Here's an example, I have a page right now that has a JS error
on line 192. It's accessing a variable called Map which is
undefined. So what do the browsers tell me when I load that page?

IE7 ------- Line 192: Map is undefined.
Firefox 2 - Map is not defined : Line 192
Safari ---- ReferenceError-Can't find variable:Forbidden:Line 0

Now if this error was unique to Safari what help would I get in
finding the error? None at all. I'd have to install SVN (OK I
have it anyway but most web developers don't). I'd have to
download the whole webkit project and build it, and only then do
I get any chance at debugging a web page.

Considering also that Safari gets more problems than other
browsers, I think it's clear why I hate it so much. There are
lines of code that all other browsers are happy with but Safari
pukes at and you have no idea why or where it's happening.

I've tried loading that page with the error on line 192 into
Windows Safari beta. Guess what, it doesn't have a javascript
console or any published way of enabling it. Even less helpful
than Mac Safari 1.3.

 

[Roger]

I just tested one of the elearning web sites that we have. In it the
user clicks a button to open a new window with some additional resources
via a cal to window.open, and it fails without warning.

The popup blocker is disabled yet still no window. IE 5.5+, FF 1+ and
Opera 9+ do open the resource window.

I bumped into this as well. I think you have to restart Safari in
order to get the popup blocker turned off. In my case I powered down
for the evening and the this morning the popups opened as expected.

A related problem is getting already opened popup windows to come into
focus when they are reused. I could not find an option to permit this
action. There is one in Firefox.

But on the plus side for Safari, I found 2 instances of where I was
creating malformed urls (http:/myapp/myfunction instead of
/myapp/myfunction) only 5 minutes after downloading and installing the
Safari beta. None of the other browsers provided a clue that there was
a problem.

Roger

 

[dd]

But on the plus side for Safari, I found 2 instances of where
I was creating malformed urls
None of the other browsers provided a clue that there was
a problem.

Or in other words, all the other browsers were intelligent
enough to handle them and Safari wasn't ;-)

 

[RobG]

Safari - Nothing !! They have Drosera
that allegedly works with Webkit, but Webkit is not Safari. I
don't think I want to be downloading a nightly build of Safari
and having to build it myself to debug a web page.

From Slashdot

<URL: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238141&cid=19468947 >

open %APPDATA%\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist in your
favorite text editor. Add:

<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
<true/>

and save it. Restart Safari.

 

[dd]

open %APPDATA%\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist in your
favorite text editor. Add:
<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
<true/>
and save it. Restart Safari.

Cheers Rob !!

 

[Tim Streater]

Oh it is so bad. It's the least developer friendly browser available.
IE allows us to debug with visual studio (or the
lite script debugger they offer). Netscape 6/7 had Venkman
(which sucked, but it was something). Firefox gives us the
always improving Firebug. Safari - Nothing !! They have Drosera
that allegedly works with Webkit, but Webkit is not Safari. I
don't think I want to be downloading a nightly build of Safari
and having to build it myself to debug a web page.

Without a debugger we're left to putting in alerts. How 1994 is
that? Safari doesn't even offer a JavaScript console by default,
and the one it does offer (if you know how to enable it) is
total garbage.

Here's an example, I have a page right now that has a JS error
on line 192. It's accessing a variable called Map which is
undefined. So what do the browsers tell me when I load that page?

IE7 ------- Line 192: Map is undefined.
Firefox 2 - Map is not defined : Line 192
Safari ---- ReferenceError-Can't find variable:Forbidden:Line 0

Now if this error was unique to Safari what help would I get in
finding the error? None at all. I'd have to install SVN (OK I
have it anyway but most web developers don't). I'd have to
download the whole webkit project and build it, and only then do
I get any chance at debugging a web page.

Considering also that Safari gets more problems than other
browsers, I think it's clear why I hate it so much. There are
lines of code that all other browsers are happy with but Safari
pukes at and you have no idea why or where it's happening.

Come come come, you must have *some* idea. I do all my development using
TextWrangler on this Mac Pro and then testing against safari. Sure, the
JavaSCript console could give a better indication of where the problem
is but you can use alerts to tell you. This approach does me fine.

 

[dd]

Come come come, you must have *some* idea.

Only if you're doing incremental development
changes would you have an idea where a new
problem might appear (i.e. in something you
recently added). But if you get a request out
of the blue to look at a page that's failing
somewhere amongst hundreds or maybe thousands
of lines of code and the error console gives
no clue at all, how can that be acceptable?

Sure, the JavaSCript console could give a
better indication of where the problem is
but you can use alerts to tell you.

Yes, that's what I said. The only useful way
is adding alerts (and even you must admit
it's a bit dark ages). If all the other
modern browsers can figure out where the bad
line is, then why can't Safari ?

 

[Tim Streater]

Only if you're doing incremental development
changes would you have an idea where a new
problem might appear (i.e. in something you
recently added). But if you get a request out
of the blue to look at a page that's failing
somewhere amongst hundreds or maybe thousands
of lines of code and the error console gives
no clue at all, how can that be acceptable?

It tells me which module the problem was in. I agree that the line
number is junk but that's probably my fault. I tend to use php to
include .js files.

Yes, that's what I said. The only useful way
is adding alerts (and even you must admit
it's a bit dark ages). If all the other
modern browsers can figure out where the bad
line is, then why can't Safari ?

I agree its a bit dark ages. But usually I have to dump out some
variables anyway.