We love customizing things. We like to tinker and make things “our own”. While I don’t often take the time to customize every little thing (I don’t even bother making playlists) I do take the time to customize things I stare at every day. Syntax coloring, text editor font, browser customizations: these are things I find value in customizing. What I haven’t seen yet, though, is Web Inspector customization:

This is super interesting to me, but makes total sense. Web Inspector is made up of HTML and CSS itself. Not too long ago you could right click and Inspect nodes within the Web Inspector itself and in turn trigger some sort of Inception style reference. Neat stuff.

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Firefox has been all over the news lately with the release of Firefox 4, the latest version of what was once my eye-opening favorite browser. Lots of browser talk focuses around performance. Every time a new browser version comes out many of the intro paragraphs for reviews mention ”OMG FASTTTT!” at least once. Speed is of the essence online, and the browser can have a large impact on that experience. Mozilla is doing something interesting by ranking Add-ons with the Slowest Start-up.

I wasn’t surprised to see Firebug, arguably the most impactful browser add-on in the history of browser Add-ons, but I was surprised to see it tied for first place as the slowest performing Firefox Add-on. I switched to OS X in 2006 and the first thing I noticed was that Firefox felt slower. I asked around and others confirmed that although it was their primary browser, it did in fact feel slower on a Mac.

Time went on, and Web Inspector came about, resulting in Safari finding a home as my default browser, as Firefox continued to grow glacial for me. Then Chrome came out, with a much more rapidly updating Web Inspector, and I haven’t looked back. I far prefer Web Inspector to Firebug now and knowing that it’s built in as opposed to being the slowest Add-on in my arsenal has me all the more comforted by my decision.

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The time has come where even the tools we use to mark up, style, script, and program are looking stellar; the designer in me is smitten. WebKit is by far the best of both worlds in that regard, and it really shines when it comes to things like the Web Inspector. Firebug really broke ground when it came to developing on the front end. It changed the way we all go about the process and streamlined things to no end. On top of that it’s helped us to optimize nearly every aspect of a page load and subsequent interaction.

When the Web Inspector first debuted it wasn’t nearly as feature rich as Firebug. In fact, the shipping version of Safari’s Web Inspector leaves a lot to be desired. When you read what’s arrived in the WebKit Nightly though, how can you not want to use it straight away? I’m not saying that Firebug is any less useful, but the changes (and the hotness) coming to Web Inspector are just stunning. I’m particularly fond of the changes coming to the Styles Inspection, DOM Inspection, Resources Inspection, and who can I kid; everything sounds supreme. Keep your eye on it.

More Web Inspector Updates

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