WWDC: My thoughts on Safari

In an ideal world, Safari would be the dominant browser. There, I said it. It doesn’t have to be the only option, as Firefox certainly has a lot to offer, but recent releases have made it unquestionably the most progressive browser on the market. It is blazing fast, supports a good chunk of HTML5, and is aggressively pushing the limits of what people think a browser can do.

As you might have guessed, I attended only iPhone web app track sessions and labs at this year’s WWDC. I would have loved to have sat in on some Mac and Cocoa Touch presentations, but the schedules overlapped significantly and were tight to make as it was. I got to meet the Webkit development team, and get first hand tips and techniques from the people behind the product on how to build for it.

We (web people) have known for a while now that Safari was including the some of the latest specs for HTML and CSS, but I certainly didn’t know how much they are contributing to the process as well. Webkit has proposed at least 20 new CSS properties including some pretty mind-blowing things like 3D extrusion and key framed animations. The iPhone and iPod touch use hardware acceleration on CSS Transitions and Animations to create velvety smooth movements and behaviors inside of your web app.

They’ve also introduced offline databases via the HTML5 spec, and support for the <audio>/<video> tags, bringing us two steps closer to true X(ML)-HTML. In one demonstration, I saw a 3-dimension carousel with touch recognition, masking, easing, and perspective taken down from about 100 lines of JS to roughly 6 lines of CSS (with JS to implement the styles). Just mind blowing.

Another thing that really got my attention was the newly overhauled web inspector. While I use Safari at home and for casual browsing, I use Firefox at work for one reason: Firebug. If you aren’t familiar with that add-on, Firebug allows you to “inspect” different elements of a page, and make non-committed changes on the fly. It has essentially revolutionized the web development world. Developer tools have been in place for a long time, but Firebug took it to another level. The problem is that Firefox on the Mac verges on unstable. It has serious memory leaks and cute quirks like randomly disabling your keyboard. If I could, I would use Safari as my primary browser without a minute’s hesitation.

In the past, you had to enable Safari’s Web Inspector via command line, almost like more like an easter egg than a feature. I played around with it briefly, before discarding it and returning to Firebug. As of Safari 4 (Developer’s Preview), Web Inspector is a force to be reckoned with. It is fully compatible with Firebug and console.log, as well as bringing a bevy of new tools with Apple’s attention to detail. I highly recommend you check it out.

The best part of the situation is that the Web Inspector, rather than being tied to Safari and its incremental release schedule, is entirely a component of Webkit. This means that you can download the nightly build, and debug against the latest standards. And it’s beautiful. I’m going to build with it for the next week and see if I can switch completely.

The internet is the next BIG platform. Safari is its console.