Bug 127307 – Web Inspector: Preferences/breakpoints don't persist by default in 3rd party apps

• Status: NEW
• Component: Web Inspector

[Daniel Jalkut]

Developers who use WebView extensively in a Mac will find that although enabling WebKitDeveloperExtras for the app does provide access to the inspector, changes to the inspector UI, setting of breakpoints, etc. are not persisted across launches.

Chatting in the IRC channel with Timothy Hatcher, we arrived at a workaround that causes the preferences to persist as expected: imposing an alternative path for the: WebKitLocalStorageDatabasePathPreferenceKey. It appears that the default value for this preferences causes the inspector to fail to save and restore the pertinent UI state preferences on behalf of the 3rd party app.

In IRC, Timothy suggested that the inspector could: "enable local storage on our inspector preferences and set a default path so it will work out of the box".

This would be a great enhancement and facilitate debugging for 3rd party developers who are incorporating WebView technologies into native apps.

[Daniel Jalkut]

I wasn't very clear in my description above. The path is imposed by setting the value for the WebKitLocalStorageDatabasePathPreferenceKey key on NSUserDefaults. Something like:

[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] setObject:localStoragePath forKey:@"WebKitLocalStorageDatabasePathPreferenceKey"]

Where localStoragePath is a path to a folder where the Web Inspector will store its state for the host app.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/15863223>