Safari 3.1 features improvements to the functionality for the Web Inspector developers tool. In now has an improved console for working with JavaScript and DOM, DOM inspector with CSS support, a nice Network analysis tool and search all built in. It is somewhat comparable to the FireBug plugin for FireFox so I will also make some comparisons of their features.
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Apple released Safari 3.1 (525.13) for both Mac and Windows users today which comes with a bunch of changes and improvements over 3.0.x series. Here are the set of changes included in the new release.

Developer Menu

The first thing you will notice is the addition of the “Develop” menu (Preferences/Advanced/Show Develop menu in menu bar) item with the following tasks:
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Today I was looking for an unobtrusive method of determining a user’s connection speed using JavaScript. A quick search on Google returned an array of tricks mostly having to do with using Ajax to make a call behind the scenes, and track the payload time for the small file. In most cases people use an image with a random variable at the end to avoid caching, like image.jpg?foo=1Rt2X21. This is all good but adds an HTTP connection which could potentially interfere with the user’s experience, especially if they are already on a slow connection to begin with. Continue »

The latest release of the iPhone SDK from Apple comes with an array of new Mac utilities for developing iPhone specific software. One of the new tools included with the iPhone SDK beta is the Aspen Simulator. Aspen is an iPhone simulator that developers can test their apps on which emulates all of the the features and functionality of the iPhone. For example you can use the mouse to swipe the page up, down, even pinch and more. Continue »

Here is a simple test to see if users have Firebug installed on their browsers. Obviously this would also weed out non-FireFox users.

if (window.console && window.console.firebug) {
  alert("found Firebug");
}else{
  alert("can't find Firebug");
}

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