WebKitGTK+ and the Web Inspector

When I started working on WebKitGTK+ I was a web developer, writing IT applications using Python and Django, and building features for content portals running Plone (argh). Even though I was an Epiphany user ever since it was forked off Galeon, I still had to use Firefox for my work, because I couldn’t really live without Firebug.

It should come as no surprise, then, that one of my first patches to WebKitGTK+ was actually making the awesome Web Inspector work in our port. After the initial support, though, not a lot has been done to further improve it, partly because it was already good enough for many uses, partly because I somehow started doing non-web development again ;).

These last weeks, through my R&D efforts in Collabora, I have been able to push Web Inspector features and integration a bit further. A simple change that boosts the Inspector’s usability quite a bit is having the nodes that are being hovered highlighted. Along with that, the ability to attach the inspector to Epiphany’s window should make it easier to use for poking the DOM.

The Web Inspector has a number of settings that control its behaviour. Since, for instance, enabling javascript debugging may slow down javascript performance, the inspector usually has it disabled by default, and provides a button to enable it. It also provides an option for always enabling that feature, but that does not work right now, because we are not saving/restoring the relevant settings. A solution to that is in the works using the GSettings infrastructure that was recently merged into glib.

Here’s a simple screencast, showing these improvements in action (click the video to check it out in full size):