Ask HN: Closest thing to Firebug for IE? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Closest thing to Firebug for IE?

13 pointsgruseom14 comments

What's the best Firebug-style tool that runs in IE? I'm using "IE Web Developer", which is grotesquely bad. There must be something out there that makes testing in IE bearable (preferably IE6 and up).

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Firebug Lite: http://getfirebug.com/lite.html

They've gotten it to come further along than I expected it would ever get.

Seconded. Also, it helps to dynamically load jQuery into the page so you can use its CSS selectors, etc. from the Firebug lite console.

http://www.command-tab.com/2008/03/13/jqueryize-bookmarklet/

Firebug Lite was indispensable when I was getting clipng to work in IE6. In particular I probably wouldn't have spent the time to make the page-scraping bookmarklet IE6 compatible without it.

http://www.debugbar.com/

DebugBar is awful

Visual Studio 2008 with client-side debugging is pretty darn good. I use that along with firefox/firebug and have found the two to be comparable. Microsoft has done a pretty good job with the javascript debugging.

If you install visual studio express 'web developer' package, which urged strongly to install microsoft sql server and some large dot net package, you can debug javascript fairly nicely:

http://www.berniecode.com/blog/2007/03/08/how-to-debug-javas...

I use a combination of this and firebog lite, but neither is as good as firebug or safari's web developer tools.

Microsoft Script Editor (if you primarily need JavaScript debugging). Unfortunately, it's bundled with MS Office - go figure. http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2006/01/howto_de...

IE Web Developer toolbar for DOM / CSS inspection and tweaking, and MS Script Editor (from MS Office) for JS debugging. Wireshark for net requests dumping.

But of course Firebug is much easier to use.

Developer Tools for IE8 with IE8 put in IE6/7 rendering mode?

This is my recommended choice. While IE8 Beta 2 is pretty buggy, and I'm not sure it can match IE7 rending mode with 100% accuracy, its by far the best available option.

This one is not bad...

http://projects.nikhilk.net/WebDevHelper/Default.aspx

XRay for some rudimentary placement information: http://www.westciv.com/xray/

It may very well be Firebug on Firefox.

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