Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer | Hacker News Reader

Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer

ejohn.org

201 pointsemontero114 comments

Knowing John Resig, we'll get a blog post in 6 weeks showing a 30% speedup in jQuery in ie6 and 7. This man is a machine.

30% would be an unfair expectation to set for John :)

under or overestimate?

Under. John is known for his insane optimizations, achieving speed ups of up to 800%. http://blog.jquery.com/2007/07/01/jquery-113-800-faster-stil...

I think dynaTrace guys did something insane. Kudos!

Believe me I was doing some IE stuff (BHOs) and working with their COM extension model is one of my worst experiences (right after creating installer using WiX system).

btw. check out my web-dev tools at http://binaryage.com :-)

That is pretty incredible. I thought that the "Develop" menu and JavaScript profiler in Safari were great, but this deep tracing tool looks even better.

I wonder how this gets such detailed information about network and DOM events without injecting debug signals into the browser binaries?

The article made it sound to me like they are altering the browser's code.

Can't you do this through COM? (Isn't that the point? I dunno, I've never programmed windows stuff...)

Yes. You can do nearly all this stuff just by hooking into MS's published interfaces. I've done many pieces of it myself, but seeing it tied together like this so comprehensively is amazing.

Anyone have any tips for memory profiling tools, other than the one mentioned in the article comments? (http://www.softwareverify.com/javascript/memory/feature.html, Windows-only, Firefox-only, non-free)

How hard would it be for browser makers to make the kinds of information this tool needs readily available (instead of the tool maker to write very low-level code, basically a giant hack) and how much work would this save for the makers of tools such as dynaTrace?

This is head and shoulders above Fiddler 2 for giving you a complete picture of what's going on.

Some tools I use

  Network
   WireShark (Cross Platform)
   Fiddler 2 (Win32)
     (Inject into SSL Requests)
  Browers Instrumenting
   Firebug (Firefox)
    FireQuery
    FireRainbow
   Html Validator (FireFox)
   Selenium IDE (FireFox)
   LeetKey (FireFox, mucking with URLEncoding/Base64 etc)
   Internet Explore Developer Tools (IE of course)
   Chrome's built in tools
   Safari's built in tools

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