If you’re a web developer, the Safari Develop menu provides tools you can use to make sure your website works well with all standards-based web browsers.
If you don’t see the Develop menu in the menu bar, choose Safari > Preferences, click Advanced, then select “Show Develop menu in menu bar.”
See the table below for a description of the commands in the Develop menu.
Open Page With | Opens the displayed webpage using a web browser installed on your computer, as listed in the submenu. |
User Agent | Changes how your web browser is identified by the web server. Use this option to “spoof” the web server into thinking that you’re using a different browser, operating system, or version of Safari, so you can investigate whether the server is providing different content under varying conditions. |
Show Web Inspector | The Web Inspector lists the resources found on a webpage, and lets you view and search the page’s source code, CSS information, DOM trees and properties, and visual DOM metrics. The Web Inspector also contains an error console and network timeline. |
Show Error Console | The error console displays HTML and XML syntax errors and warnings. It also displays JavaScript errors and other messages from console.log, console.error, console.warn, console.assert, and console.info. |
Show Page Source | Shows the HTML source code for the main frame of the displayed webpage. To search the source code, press Command (⌘)-F, then enter a word or phrase in the search field that appears in the Source Code pane. |
Show Page Resources | Shows a list of webpage resources, such as documents, style sheets, and scripts. |
Show Snippet Editor | Lets you quickly test small fragments of HTML without opening an entire webpage. |
Show Extension Builder | Packages and provides metadata for Safari extensions. |
Start Timeline Recording | Records timelines in the WebKit Inspector for Network Requests, Layout & Rendering, and JavaScript & Events. To stop recording, choose Develop > Stop Timeline Recording. |
Empty Caches | Empties the webpage cache and other Safari caches. |
Disable Caches | Retrieves a subresource from the web server each time the subresource is accessed, rather than using a cached copy. |
Disable Images | Shows the alternate content for images instead of the images themselves. This is useful for ensuring your webpage has appropriate alternate content. |
Disable Styles | Ignores all CSS styles. This is useful for investigating some types of page layout problems on your website. If you have a style sheet set in the Advanced pane of Safari preferences, it continues to be used. |
Disable JavaScript | Ignores all JavaScript. This is useful for investigating problems with how parts of websites behave, and for testing how a website performs on web browsers that don’t support JavaScript or have JavaScript disabled. You can also turn JavaScript off and on in the Security pane of Safari preferences. |
Disable Site-specific Hacks | Turns off special-case Safari code that works around issues with certain websites, so that developers of those websites can test solutions to the issues. |
Disable Local File Restrictions | Treats all files on your Mac as being of the same origin, so that the files can access each other’s content via scripting or XHR. This enables a copy of a website on your Mac to function as if it were on the Internet. |
Allow JavaScript from Smart Search Field | Lets you type or paste a URL containing “javascript:” in the address and search field. |