WebKit's Web Inspector gets a major revamp

WebKit, the rendering engine in Safari, Chrome and other browsers, has had a reworked Web Inspector incorporated into the latest nightly builds. The Web Inspector is a window which can be displayed in WebKit based browsers which allows developers to inspect and interact with the browser's displayed web pages and JavaScript.

The redesigned interface now has a task oriented display, offering toolbar buttons to access views page elements, resources, scripts, profiling and databases. The console, which was previously in its own view is now accessible in any view and can be toggled with the Escape key. The console has been enhanced with auto-completion and tab-completion and compatibility with Firebug has been improved.

The scripts view in Web Inspector replaces the standalone Drosera debugger, giving WebKit built-in JavaScript debugging for the first time. One enhancement in the debugging is the ability to view the call stack by scope, making it easier for JavaScript developers to know where and how variables were created. The databases view allows developers to examine databases created using HTML 5 database storage which has already been implemented in WebKit. The search field in Web Inspector has also been enhanced; it now understands XPath and CSS selectors.

The new Web Inspector is available now in nightly builds of WebKit for Windows and Mac OS X and the developers are looking for feedback on the new features. The improvements will then appear in WebKit using browsers as they update the WebKit version they use.

(djwm)