Inspect Browser

This is an indispensable app for web development using the iPad. There are a handful of developers who care about power users on the iPad, and the developer of Inspect Browser is one of them. I love the developer features and how much is revealed in them. It’s very close to desktop level browser developer tools. I can’t imagine there’s a ton of money in developer focused iPadOS apps, but I hope it’s worth the time and effort of ongoing development. Losing this one would really hurt. I have two improvement requests: 1) I wish the console pane would show errors like resources not loading, etc, which it doesn’t seem to, and 2) I would like to see file sizes in either network or resources or both. Recently I was doing image optimization and I needed to be able to see which size images the browser was pulling down and how many kb those were.

I sit at work all day debugging on 3 large screen monitors. I chuckled a bit when I first saw this app but seriously, WOW! The mere fact that I can’t inspect a nodes box model, change some css properties, sort/analyze network requests, view/edit local/session storage is pretty ridiculous for a phone app. These guys did a phenomenal job incorporating webkits’ debugging capability’s into a small screen. Although I laugh at the idea of actually using this on my iPhone, I could see it being actually useful for those on an iPad. That being said, actual developers probably don’t own iPads but rather surfaces or chrome books because Apple won’t expose runtimes or compilers on their mobile or tablet devices... hence why you can’t set breakpoints in scripts in this app. Some of the panels & windows can be a little finicky operating but considering the capabilities of this app I’d find it hard to believe anyone could do it better. A nice feature would be a json/js beautifier when viewing in sources tab. Keeping in mind that the compiler is off limits, I would think it’s definitely possible to run scripts through a static syntax highlighter for easy viewing.

Based on my first 10 minutes, color me impressed. As a front end developer who spends a great deal of time debugging in Chrome & Firefox web inspectors, I found it intuitive and useful. Was able to successfully run a simple jQuery method in the console and toggle CSS attributes exactly like in a desktop browser. Some less than intuitive behaviors I observed: unexpected pinch-to-zoom action (the whole viewport frame would shrink rather than just the page), couldn’t scroll the page in Inspect mode, and there was some Line 0 script errors w/o details. Any of these could be due to my lack of experience with the app but they seemed like they could be more obvious, if so. Regardless, I consider it worth the cost as a quick and easy way to do some debugging on iOS (I tried it on iPhone Xs, which made everything crowded, but entirely useful in a pinch.)