Why are Apple making developing websites with Safari a pain? It used to be my favourite tool, but recent changes in Mountain Lion will make Safari my least-favoured browser.

No RSS

You can see the argument for deprecating RSS feeds. They’re a bit like cassette tapes: cherished by a dwindling minority and ignored by the majority. But here’s where Apple have made a totally inexplicable decision: When you load up an RSS feed, the page refuses to show you a damn thing.

OK, but you’re going to show me the XML, right?

No. Safari has received the XML, interpreted it as RSS, then decided not to show you anything. No view source code or view source XML, nothing.

Who at Apple took this decision? Why did they think that developers would not like to be able to see the XML that they’ve created? What kind of madness is this?

View Source is no longer that

This one blew me away just now. Absolutely shocked me to the core. When I view source now, it’s not the source of the loaded page at all, but the source of the rendered DOM, once all JS has been executed.

If I had wanted sautéed potatoes, I would have ordered sautéed potatoes. I ordered fries, so give me my goddam fries.

I want to see the code of my pages before the DOM gets manipulated, then use web inspector to check that the JavaScript has done its job properly.

Safari was the only browser doing view source properly before now and now they’ve killed it. Firefox and Chrome used to load in the source as a separate request, which didn’t work either.

Activity Monitor

Out and out the most used feature on Safari by me was the activity monitor.

What element on the page is holding up page load? Find out with activity monitor.
How many calls are my adserving partner making? Find out with activity monitor.
Is that an official Twitter feed? Find out with activity monitor.
What’s the filesize of that image? Find out with activity monitor.
How many different  hosts does this page? Find out with activity monitor.
How many elements are on this page? Find out with activity monitor.
Of these, how many come from 3rd parties? Find out with activity monitor.

I could go on, but you see where I’m coming from.

Why does Apple see fit to remove these things and not give you an inkling as to where the information now resides?

iCloud Tabs

This was awesome. See what tabs your other devices have open. Great, let me have a look.

But wait, what? Although the tab sits on Safari now, the iOS devices won’t be able to fill this space until iOS6 comes out in 2 months time?

THEN WHY PUT IT IN NOW?

Conclusion

To most users, the Safari 6.0 will be great – faster browsing, tab view, err, Chinese stuff – but for developers Safari sucks big time. Hopefully this is just Apple’s customary slap on the wrists for early adopters and this will get fixed, but then again it could be a symptom of the direction of Apple in the future..

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Filed under: Apple Mac,Coding - @ September 5, 2012 12:25 pm