You’ve probably asked yourself the same question like I did: where is that darn debugger?? Where did the stack trace go??

Well, in fact, there ARE a few tricks you can apply to IE to make it more developer friendly! First of all, the IE developer toolbar is a must-have tool. But that’s not a debugger like, for instance, venkman is.

Debugbar is a nice effort of creating an actual debugging-, css- and DOM-inspection capable plugin for IE. It even lets you inspect your XMLHTTPRequests and it’s free for personal use. That’s also the reason why we chose not to use Debugbar.

Arjen already mentioned the bliss of debugging in Firefox and commenters talked about external debuggers for IE. Now, let’s take a look at what IE has to offer natively, i.e. without the need to install any browser add-ons. This is the subject that hurts us developers the most. All we can do is pop up alerts to show what our application is doing (and when it stopped doing stuff!). An alert dialog box halts the entire application and can drive us crazy when it’s invoked inside a loop-statement.

However, there’s a neat trick that - to my big surprise - no one knew of (so it must be a ‘hidden feature’!): press CTRL+C when your javascript alert has focus and press CTRL+V inside a blank document in Notepad. There you have it; the contents of the alert dialog has been pasted inside a text editor, so you can take a closer look at it!

We use this trick quite often to inspect strings of HTML that we dump into the ‘innerHTML’ property of a DOM element.

Of course, we have our own debugging and profiling systems, which we developed in-house. Please leave a comment if you would like to learn about those!

Cheers!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Development, Web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.