How to Debug Websites on iPhone Safari

Since the iPhone launched in 2007, a mobile version of Safari has been included in all iOS devices. If a user doesn’t change it, it’s the default browser on Apple devices. Last year, Apple’s number of active devices witnessed a significant increase to 1.5 billion. Since the user base keeps rising, Apple constantly ensures a near-perfect user experience and an optimized performance across all its devices. Devs or testers can locate it in the development view and use the element selector to inspect specific Safari mobile web elements after activating the inspector. IPhone holds a significant share of Apple’s revenue and has been one of its pioneer products.

  • The Safari debugger is accessible from the Sources tab of the Developer Tools window, or by entering the debugger
    command in the console as part of a snippet.
  • I have heard of people running over to Best Buy or an Apple Store to quick debug something on a display machine.
  • Learn how to build a Safari Web Extension that works for all devices, and discover how you can convert an existing extension to Safari through Xcode and the Safari Web Extension Converter.
  • This suite of command-line tools includes an installer package, tutorial, user documentation, and reference.
  • In my recent efforts in troubleshooting one small “nuance” between Chrome on Mac and Chrome and Safari on iOS (yes, all three were acting differently), I needed to debug my browser on my iPad and/or iPhone.

Dummies has always stood for taking on complex concepts and making them easy to understand. Dummies helps everyone be more knowledgeable and confident in applying what they know. After the Debug Console is enabled, Safari reports any errors it encounters when accessing a website. At the top of every web page, just under the address bar, the Debug Console reports any HTML, JavaScript, or CSS errors. Write automated tests to exercise web content in Safari to ensure a good user experience, and run those same tests against other browsers with a WebDriver-compliant driver.

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The advantage of using BrowserStack is that you don’t need to purchase a new device or install different browsers or operating systems for testing. Teams or individuals can opt for BrowserStack Real Device Cloud, offering 3000+ real devices and browsers to test websites and apps under real user conditions for accurate testing. With iOS holding 31.16% of the global mobile OS market share, its popularity speaks for itself. Therefore, it is safe to assume that millions of users worldwide expect to access websites and web apps via the Safari browsers on their iOS devices, most commonly iPhones.

safari ios developer tools

Understand all the activity that occurs on an open web page, such as network requests, layout and rendering, JavaScript events, memory, and CPU impact. Everything is neatly plotted on a timeline https://wizardsdev.com/en/vacancy/senior-ios-developer/ or recored by frame, helping you discover ways to optimize your site. Type JavaScript commands in the console to interactively debug, modify, and get information about your webpage.

How do I use Developer tools in Safari?

It allows web developers to edit web pages on the fly, debug JavaScript, and more. There is no developer toolbar for Safari iPad, but you could definitely use something like firebug lite to do most of what you want! Just add the bookmarklet to your bookmarks, and then load it while you’re looking at your page.

safari ios developer tools

Preview animation keyframes and their classes from HTML5 canvas, JavaScript animations, CSS animations, and CSS transitions. See a detailed list of all network requests made to load every web page resource, so you can quickly evaluate the response, status, timing, and more. Find every resource of a webpage, including documents, images, scripts, stylesheets, and more. Use the built-in debugger with data type and code highlights to troubleshoot and understand the script execution flow.

Safari for developers

Also, with LambdaTest integrations, you can directly mark your bugs from LambdaTest and use Asana, JIRA, or other bug management tools. In addition to that, users can also move them to Gitlab, GitHub or carry out communication over Slack. Other integrations include Mantis Bug tracker, Clubhouse, Bugherd, TeamWork, Paymo, VSTS, and BitBucket. As mentioned in the above method, here is how you can easily debug websites on iPhone and iPads on Safari using the Web Inspector. You should then see a banner at the top of web pages with messages from the debug console.

safari ios developer tools

It’s understandable; Chrome has a
huge lead in marketshare and has invested a lot of effort in
making their developer tools easy to use. What you may not know is that Safari also includes a fully-featured
development toolkit that has feature-parity with the major features found in Chrome Dev Tools. The methods mentioned above are helpful for QA teams to debug websites using Safari Developer tools. Interface bugs can lie on the spectrum of simply being annoying and causing major user experience disruptions. Debugging on Safari browsers is necessary to launch web applications that work well under all conditions. Web developers must validate website appearance across different screen sizes to maintain cross browser compatibility.

The web developer’s toolkit

Once the Console appears, be sure to click the Logs button
to view any logs that are currently available. You can also view other relevant application and logging information in
the Sources tab of the Safari Developer Tools window. Learn how to use Apple Safari’s built-in developer tools to inspect and debug your web applications. Safari Developer Tools is a set of web development tools built into Apple’s Safari web browser. It allows developers to inspect, debug, and optimize their web applications.

You should now see the components list from the React Devtools Electron app. Yes, you can throttle network speed, but
it requires you to install Xcode, connect an iOS device, and use the iOS Network Link Conditioner. Another great feature of timelines is the Timeline Recording process.

Written by Matt Croak Code

You can also access the Developer Tools by long-pressing on the Refresh button in your browser’s address bar. Deliver unparalleled digital experience with our Next-Gen, AI-powered testing cloud platform. Ensure exceptional user experience across all devices and browsers.

Now that you have the Safari Developer Tools enabled, you can open the web inspector, console, and network information
all from the Develop menu you enabled. Developer Tools in Safari for iOS provides developers with a suite of powerful and easy-to-use debugging, testing, and optimization tools. It can be used to diagnose issues in websites and web apps, test performance and compatibility across different versions of iOS, or even optimize code to make sure it runs smoothly on any device. Safari is the best way to experience the internet on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.