Yesterday I made this tweet from @ThePracticalDev Twitter account:
And then I left Twitter to get back to work. I'm not nearly as good about hanging around Twitter as I used to be—because I have better productivity habits. 😄
Anyway, some folks were confused by what I meant, or disagreed:
What I meant was not that our tools for inspection are getting worse. In fact, they are getting better, more powerful all the time. I love my Chrome web tools and Firefox et al are more than keeping pace. But that is generally more for desktop development. It's clearly harder to inspect the source of a page on mobile. It's such a pain in the ass if you don't already have a good setup that many devs probably have never bothered inspecting the source on mobile. Even though most "work" still happens on desktop (debatable), clearly it's not the environment where most computer use takes place.
It's all Steve Jobs' fault. I'm kidding—sort of. We know about his arguments with Woz about how many slots the Apple II should have had, and it never stopped. Apple has worked tirelessly to make their products—both hardware and software—into a black box. I'm all for a user-friendly shell, but it's absolutely a shame that getting under the hood is now for specialists and not for whoever wants to take a peek.
Others, like Google, have followed. Every new operating system seems to make inspecting the gears harder, and it's a shame. Is it important that we maintain the ability for the average user to quickly dive into the source? Maybe, maybe not. I'd personally say yes and others would too, but either way it's a shame to lose this mindset. Code inspection feature that didn't need to exist in browsers in the first place, but it became a standard thing and it's sad that it stopped being the norm across all devices.