“Sunrise Browser is an open source Web browser for Mac OS X intended for use as a Web developer’s tool. It is not a groundbreaking achievement in that regard, but it is worth checking out due to its innovative and often unusual user interface choices.”
I like how you can change the browser size to other resolutions, thats really nice. I would also like to see a browser that implements many rendering engines you can switch between how IE and FF display a page for example. That would help me a lot with development. Also safari for the PC would be great so I don’t have to have a mac on my desk at work.
Well, The WebDeveloper extension for Firefox lets you change the window size to a specific resolution, and you can use the IETab extension to switch between IE and Gecko rendering enginges in Firefox so that you can have two tabs open, one using IE, and one using Gecko.
As for Safari for PC, any KHTML/Webkit based Windows browser might be a while off. KDE4 may be able to provide this though, through a Windows port of Konqueror.
Looks like this browser and its site has some innovative and often unusual word choices.
The first thing that hit me, was that you must type “http://“ when you enter an address. Otherwise it will just do a Google search. That alone makes it almost useless, in my opinion.
During my fairly short test, the only neat feature that I found was the resolution settings. The browser is rather basic, and doesn’t have anywhere near the feature set of the likes of Opera or Firefox, or even Safari. Maybe it will get better later on, though.
For development, go with Opera (see http://dev.opera.com/tools/) or Firefox instead.
+1 on that! It took me a few minutes to figure just what the hell was going on. Of course, I have been drinking too.
Ryan-
I’d like to see the graphical bookmarks in other browsers. This is actually a really good idea!
It’s probably just me, but I like the width sizing too.
Other than that the app needs heavy polishing, but it does look useful for web dev. I’ll be sure to try the export page to pdf thing, although I think safari already does that.
The Firebug plugin for Firefox is amazing.
– Edit HTML / CSS / Javascript in the buffer, with syntax highlighting and view the results prior to changing you actual code.
– Breakpoints / Stepping / Watch etc for javascript within the page.
– Select nodes with you mouse and have the corresponding HTML highlighted or vice-versa.
John Resig of Jquery fame had a great video of what firebug can do for javascipt developes posted somewhere on his blog.
..very handy. But it lacks for example Safari’s activity window which shows everything that is loaded. Even more useful to me.
The article says “GPLed source code” but the official page says BSD.
Personally I use Firefox+WebDeveloper extension, but having more tools for Safari is always nice, although I’d reserve judgment until I get back home to my Mac to try it, particularly after reading this:
“During my fairly short test, the only neat feature that I found was the resolution settings.”
I already have bookmarklets that do that in Safari. :/
Honestly, I think this browser needs a whole lot of work before you can call it a useful tool for anything. Not to discount it entirely, but it needs to prove itself before it’s really newsworthy.
Some of the features are neat (okay, the bookmark thing is clever, they can have that) but I can’t see myself ever resizing my browser window because a website looks funny. I tend to laugh at poor web design and live with it – if the site is only 800 pixels wide, I gain nothing by halving the size of my browser window.
I disagree with them about using an editor for View Source With; it’s not like you can actually edit and reload a page unless you’re viewing static HTML on your local machine, which in this day and age is pretty uncommon compared to developing in some form of script through a local web server. Frankly Firefox’s source view is worth it just because it’s find is better than anything else – which is all I ever want to do with it anyway.
A> if it’s supposed to be a web developer ‘browser’, how about embedding a real text editor that will let you save if a local file, or set up for FTP in the background if working on a remote page. Opera is rapidly approaching this functionality out of box, their editor falling just shy of having useful edit features, BUT is able to save/load local files. You can edit in Opera’s source view and hit ‘apply changes’, switch to the tab and see it.
B> I fail to see how it’s bloated bookmark system is of any ‘help’, much less that it chews up so much screen it looks impossible to maintain, much less find anything. (again, god forbid people use folders) – of course, the engrish “The bookmarks of text base has inconsistntly titles” – just what are they trying to say there… (I realize the native language is japanese, but some care when pushing your ‘big feature’ should be in order)
But then, I’m the guy who finds thumbnail views useless the moment you get more than ten items in a directory, finds expose/beryl/flip3d useless when you have more than one copy of textedit/gedit/notepad open, and thinks spatial navigation is a total dee dee dee since in most implementations you cannot tell if you are in /var/libs, /etc/libs, /shareaza/downloads/porn/libs – In these situations I usually end up screaming at the screen ‘oh for **** sake, just show me a ******* text only list!’ (or in the latter case, a filesystem TREE). More goofy graphics in the name of making it ‘easier’ that in fact just make it more difficult – JOY.
C> the ability to set widths is cute, if it didn’t exist as addons for Opera and FF already… of course it wouldn’t even BE an issue if web developers took the time to get off their asses and STOP DESIGNING FIXED WIDTH WEBSITES THAT RENDER AS CRAPPY LITTLE STRIPES DOWN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN ON DECENT DISPLAYS!!! (sorry for the yelling, but it had to be said) – I make this crazy assumption that if the user has the browser width set that wide, they want to see the page that wide – otherwise, why in the hell would they have the browser set that big?
D> Web development on a Mac, well, maybe if you had parallels so you could test for IE… But then I work in XP so I can run Opera, IE 6&7 and FF native,
A> if it’s supposed to be a web developer ‘browser’, how about embedding a real text editor that will let you save if a local file, or set up for FTP in the background if working on a remote page. Opera is rapidly approaching this functionality out of box, their editor falling just shy of having useful edit features, BUT is able to save/load local files. You can edit in Opera’s source view and hit ‘apply changes’, switch to the tab and see it.
B> I fail to see how it’s bloated bookmark system is of any ‘help’, much less that it chews up so much screen it looks impossible to maintain, much less find anything. (again, god forbid people use folders) – of course, the engrish “The bookmarks of text base has inconsistntly titles” – just what are they trying to say there… (I realize the native language is japanese, but some care when pushing your ‘big feature’ should be in order)
But then, I’m the guy who finds thumbnail views useless the moment you get more than ten items in a directory, finds expose/beryl/flip3d useless when you have more than one copy of textedit/gedit/notepad open, and thinks spatial navigation is a total dee dee dee since in most implementations you cannot tell if you are in /var/libs, /etc/libs, /shareaza/downloads/porn/libs – In these situations I usually end up screaming at the screen ‘oh for **** sake, just show me a ******* text only list!’ (or in the latter case, a filesystem TREE). More goofy graphics in the name of making it ‘easier’ that in fact just make it more difficult – JOY. I’m getting really sick of these barely intelligible thumbnails and vague icons that mean nothing to me – God forbid people be expected to READ TEXT.
C> the ability to set widths is cute, if it didn’t exist as addons for Opera and FF already… of course it wouldn’t even BE an issue if web developers took the time to get off their asses and STOP DESIGNING FIXED WIDTH WEBSITES THAT RENDER AS CRAPPY LITTLE STRIPES DOWN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN ON DECENT DISPLAYS!!! (sorry for the yelling, but it had to be said) – I make this crazy assumption that if the user has the browser width set that wide, they want to see the page that wide – otherwise, why in the hell would they have the browser set that big?
D> Web development on a Mac, well, maybe if you had parallels so you could test for IE… But seriously, it’s a BAD development platform since most pages designed on a Mac, even testing for Opera and Firefox, don’t tend to actually WORK in other OS implementations, even on the same browser.
Of course, if designers quit chanting “Design for (fill in the blank favorite browser), hack for IE” like some sort of religious mantra (usually the same ******* that call tables for layout a hack, are obsessed with source order for SEO instead of just having site content people WANT to visit, you know – click-through link whores), and instead just used HTML/CSS that worked across all browsers in the first place… well, they probably wouldn’t end up having to go back and re-hack their websites for every new flavor of the month browser like IE7 and FF2.0
Of course any GOOD developer doesn’t rely on any one browser for anything – I work in XP so I can test Opera 9, IE 6&7 and FF 2.0 native, in Parallels run win98 to test Opera 8.5, IE 5.5, FF 1.0.x and Netscape 8 (I will NOT run the latest Nyetscape outside a sandbox – the thing is so malware laden it makes IE6 look good), also in parallels run Ubuntu for testing Konqueror and Galeon, and have a Mac (well, kind of) on a KVM for testing IE 5.2 and Safari.
– back on topic –
I fail to see anything that makes this more of a ‘developers browser’ than Opera or FF – it’s barely a step up from stock safari and it seems they spent more time on the goofy bookmarking than they did anything useful to a developer.
Edited 2007-04-11 15:13