But instead of just including them as they are, we’ve added considerable tweaks: apart from the regular CSS inspection, you can inspect multiple clients synchronously: when you modify the DOM or CSS styles in any way, your change will be replicated on all connected clients. Then, it will keep all of them in sync – meaning that if you use your desktop browser to do a test run, everything you do (scrolling, link clicking, form filling, etc.) will be replicated on all connected clients.Īpart from the synchronized testing, Ghostlab ships with Google Chrome’s DevTools.
#GHOSTLAB ICON MAC#
Ghostlab (which runs on both Mac and Windows) proxies the site you want to test (either from your local filesystem or a remote URL) and lets any number of clients (browsers or devices) connect to the site at the same time. Unfortunately, weinre doesn’t support some CSS features like pseudo elements, media queries or import rules, and it doesn’t support JavaScript debugging. To use weinre, you need to add a script the page you want to debug and start the weinre server on the command line. Before that you could (and still can) use weinre (“WEb INspector REmote”), a project that enjoyed great popularity for mobile debugging. The addition of development tools for mobile devices to browsers has been quite recent.
#GHOSTLAB ICON HOW TO#
Even if you can find a toolset for each of your platforms, you’ll need to set all of them up, figure out how to work with them – and that’s still not taking into consideration that you’ll have to connect each device to your computer with a cable. In addition to these limitations, you basically need a separate toolset for each target platform – one for Safari on iOS, and one for Chrome on Android. And of course, you’ll need a Mac to do so. This is similar on iOS, where you are only able to inspect mobile Safari. Also, you can only inspect pages that run in Chrome – if you experience problems in another mobile browser, that won’t be enough. On Android, it won’t work below version 4.0. So let’s say that for two popular platforms, there are ways to inspect your website on the device – albeit with limitations. For each device, you’ll be able to inspect and debug any web page that is being displayed in Safari. Then open Safari on your computer, and in the “Developer” menu, you’ll see a list of iOS devices currently connected to your computer by cable. In the advanced Safari settings on the device, enable the option “Web Inspector”. You also need to connect your device to the computer with USB. This is possible for iOS as well, Safari to Safari. After you’ve allowed the desktop access on the device, you can inspect and debug any web page that is viewed in Chrome on the device. To set this up, enable USB debugging on the device, and in your computer’s Chrome, browse to `chrome://inspect` to discover the device. On your computer, you’ll also need Chrome.
#GHOSTLAB ICON ANDROID#
Goggle’s developer tools allow you to inspect any web page running in Chrome on Android by connecting the Android device (only 4.0 and newer) to your computer via USB. Then, we’ll introduce Ghostlab’s approach to remote inspection and debugging with the help of a simple example. We’re first going to outline how you can inspect and debug websites on Android and iOS using Google’s and Apple’s respective toolset (we’ve chosen to limit ourselves to these platforms for the sake of briefness). Let’s have a look at what your options are for mobile debugging tools. Now while that’s true for desktop browsers, it’s a little more difficult when you try to identify a problem in a browser on a mobile device. Whether it’s Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari, you will be able to inspect the DOM, apply CSS modifications in real-time, browse through loaded script files, set breakpoints to manually control the flow of execution and trace any exception or unexpected behaviour to its cause. Modern desktop browsers offer powerful integrated developer tools that let you get to the bottom of CSS or JavaScript problems quickly. And why not? Chrome DevTools are a part of Blink, which is open source, right? We just needed a tool to make it happen. I think a lot of us developers use Chrome because the DevTools are so good, and it sure would be able to use them in other browsers, even on mobile devices. I was pretty impressed when I heard that the newly-released Ghostlab 2 could do this. The following a guest post by Andi Dysart and Matthias Christen of Ghostlab.