Bug 268881 – Web Inspector: Infos and Debugs buttons don't appear in Console tab until new console messages are displayed

• Component: Web Inspector
• Status: REOPENED

[Jeff Johnson]

Created attachment 469754 [details]
Screenshot of Console tab with missing Infos and Debugs

Steps to reproduce:
1) Open https://www.apple.com
2) Open web inspector console

Expected results: The Infos and Debugs categories should appear after All, Evaluations, Errors, Warnings, Logs.

Actual results: The Infos and Debugs categories don't appear. See screenshot Console1.png.

If you scroll down the page a little so that new console messages are logged, then Infos and Debugs appear. See screenshot Console2.png.

[Jeff Johnson]

Created attachment 469755 [details]
Screenshot of Console tab with Infos and Debugs

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/122923625>

[Qianlang Chen]

Pull request: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/24565

[EWS]

Committed 275914@main (eaa47ea7c85e): <https://commits.webkit.org/275914@main>

Reviewed commits have been landed. Closing PR #24565 and removing active labels.

[Jeff Johnson]

I'm testing with Safari Technology Preview 191, released today, and I don't see how this bug is fixed?

[Qianlang Chen]

Thank you so much for verifying, Jeff!

The behavior seems to not have changed in the new release because we have kept the Infos and Debugs category buttons to only appear with their corresponding console.info and console.debug messages.

While analyzing this bug, we considered making the buttons always appear, but we eventually opted against it to favor a more minimal UI. The Infos and Debugs categories aren't as frequently used as the default message types. But also, our inspector's UI currently suffers from bugs involving small screen sizes where the category bar can't display all of its contents. Keeping the Infos and Debugs categories only conditionally visible helps mitigate these display issues until we implement further improvements.

However, your original report did identify a critical bug with the two category buttons: they didn't appear with corresponding message types, but they showed up with messages that came from other channels/sources. What we ended up fixing was that inconsistency, so if you try running this code in the console
    console.info("my info"), console.debug("my debug");
You should see the Infos and Debugs buttons appear.

(See the https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/24565 if you're interested in our full discussion on deciding this fix.)

Thanks again for reporting the bug and verifying, Jeff!

[Jeff Johnson]

> The Infos and Debugs categories aren't as frequently used as the default message types.

This could be in part because those categories don't appear in the tab.

I'm a Safari extension developer and would like to use console.debug to distinguish my extension's messages from page's own messages. Frequently the console can get deluged with tons of messages from the page. What I'd like to do is make Debugs the default selection in the web inspector.

Fortunately, the Debugs selection is retained when you close and reopen the console. However, if you switch to another catgory (say, Errors) to check it, then the Debugs category disappears if there are no debug messages, or if the console is cleared. This makes it very difficult to keep Debugs as the default.

Could you make it so that once the Debugs and/or Infos categories have appeared in the console, the categories won't disappear while the console is still open?

[Qianlang Chen]

Hi Jeff, thank you for the follow-up and suggestion!

I see where you're coming from and I can totally understand how our fix can be an inconvenience.

I have created a new report at https://webkit.org/b/271894 for our potential new fix or adjustment. We will keep this bug on our radar.

Thanks again!