I wanted to keep my logging statements as short as possible while preventing console from being accessed when it doesn't exist; I came up with the following solution:

var _ = {};
if (console) {
    _.log = console.debug;
} else {
    _.log = function() { }
}

To me, this seems quite elegant, and it works great in Firefox 3.6 (including preserving the line numbers that make console.debug more useful than console.log). But it doesn't work in Safari 4. [Update: Or in Chrome. So the issue seems to be a difference between Firebug and the Webkit console.] If I follow the above with

console.debug('A')
_.log('B');

the first statement works fine in both browsers, but the second generates a "TypeError: Type Error" in Safari. Is this just a difference between how Firebug and the Safari Web Developer Tools implement console? If so, it is VERY annoying on Apple's Webkit's part. Binding the console function to a prototype and then instantiating, rather than binding it directly to the object, doesn't help.

I could, of course, just call console.debug from an anonymous function assigned to _.log, but then I'd lose my line numbers. Any other ideas?