I got a chance to play with Safari and tested out a few different sites. I started to feel like I was flying blind. Where’s the JavaScript console? Where’s any notification of JavaScript errors for that matter? If Safari is going to claim to be “like Gecko” it needs to work like it. In one case the contents of a DHTML page that works fine in Mozilla just didn’t appear and I had no information about what was failing. Frustrating.
I was also bothered by it not recognizing the view-source: prefix to show the source of any URL until I found the Activity window. The Activity window shows all the URLs loaded with a particular page and you can double-click them to view them individually. Nice. Still, the View Source bookmarklet has worked in basically every browser for years so it would be nice to support.
I found a site describing a Safari Enhancer that “enables several hidden features of the Safari webbrowser beta.” The screenshots show a Debug menu with a View DOM tree item, the ability to change the browser identity of Safari, a minimum font size option, and ways to import bookmarks in various formats. Sounds helpful. Too bad I don’t have a mac to play with all the time.