Chrome mobile emulation mode vs Safari 9.0 Responsive design mode

I already covered that Apple has announced announced several testing tools at WWDC 2015 but responsive design mode didn’t get any mention in it.

Check this video that introduces this mode and goes in depth

[embed height=”315" width=”560"]http://youtu.be/Id6MXibRM4E[/embed]

This looks great and frankly apple caring about how websites look in mobile is very heartening given their staunch preference for apps. I also covered chrome mobile emulation mode here, now the natural question comes which to pick?

Device emulation mode
Responsive design mode
Creator Google Apple Mechanism for emulation User agent and viewport manipulation Same but only limited support for user agents Platform support Can emulate all popular mobiles and tablets for bother Android and iOS Can emulate only Apple created devices — iPod, iPhone (4–6), iPads Landscape/Portrait mode Supported Supported Support for multitasking / multiple panes No Yes, you can snap the browser window to all the supported sizes Image resolution No support 1x,2x, and 3x for retina images Debugging tools Far superior and flexible Web inspector catching up Support for desktop modes No Supports as big as the device. iMac can do Mac pro, iPad etc

Conclusion

Hence like any other problem in a real world — the correct answer is it depends on the context. Responsive design mode definetely have some use cases (Safari rendering, multipane rendering, image checking etc) but as a default I would still use chrome emulation