Browser Development and Testing Tools

Want Firebug for IE, Safari, or Opera?

Firebug still reigns supreme (though the Web Developer Toolbar is critical as well for it’s CSS live editing capabilities, in my opinion), but what about when you need Firebug for other browsers? Luckily there are now options that are useful in a pinch.

Our friend Chris Coyer at CSS-Tricks wrote a nice comparison of the available browser development tools. We’ll just quickly add our own additional thoughts below.

Firefox: Firebug isn’t complete without the Web Developers Toolbar

As we mentioned in our previous post, Firefox + Firebug isn’t complete without the Web Developers Toolbar. There’s a screencast there too that shows the power of these two tools combined.

Internet Explorer (still kind of sucks)

The IE Developer Toolbar leaves a lot to be desired, which you know if you’ve ever used it. It’s better than nothing, but if you need to debug JavaScript… it’s not really better than nothing, since it doesn’t do anything for JavaScript. Luckily, there is a workaround for debugging JavaScript in IE. It’s not the easiest, but it works, and is the best option we’ve found.

I’m going to repeat myself here, in case you weren’t listening. You should go to that link and bookmark it or something if nothing else, because if you do any javascript work you probably will need that sooner or later, and it’s not particularly easy to find in Google.

Safari’s Web Inspector is actually really neat

Chris makes this pretty clear, but Web Inspector is actually quite neat and very capable. If you have Safari issues that you need to debug, or if you just prefer to work with Safari instead of Firefox, you should definitely play around with this.