In a world of FireFox and its beautiful extensions of web-development power, Internet Explorer has been a horrid browser to develop/debug your code.
Microsoft has a fancy FireBug clone for the bane of every web developer…Internet Explorer! They call it the Web Developer Toolbar (although it isn’t much of a toolbar and more of a tool set) and it is a blessing for finding problems in IE. Its features include:
- Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
- Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
- Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
- View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
- Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
- Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
- Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
- Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
- Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
- Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
- Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
- View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.
The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.
This toolbar isn’t a match for the features, look, or usability of FireBug…but it is a great start and a pretty decent tool provided by the guys at Microsoft. As many developers can attest, developing sites that work according to standards AND Internet Explorer is a pain…this tool eases that pain.
Oh, and once you install the toolbar, it is hard to see where to open the thing. After installing, a little blue arror will appear in the icon bar at the top of the browser. Click that and the tool will open at the bottom of the screen.
To call it a clone of Firebug is quite a stretch. A clone of the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar perhaps. But Firebug goes way beyond this.
Is can’t edit code as fire bug!
girl: it can edit the code like FF, but need to press Enter button.
i like this ie developer toolbar than fierbug.
i hate to click that inspect button everytime i need to check some div or class. the ie tool do the work. only a click and i click anywhere, any as many time as i want.
and ie developer toolbar has never crash the browser, fierbug do crash. it is a know issue in fierfox, and it has been listed as a problematic extensions here
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions
I agree with passingby in that IE doesn’t crash as much with it’s developer toolbar, but that’s if you can get the damn thing working. And personally I *hate* the way I have to click off the inspection mode to resume using the site normally – I like Firebug’s approach a lot more. Plus, I can inspect elements inside of frames in Firebug, not to mention the vastly superior information it gives.
This is really great. I didn’t know there was a plugin like this!
I am trying to install and use this on my IE for Linux with Wine.
The installation was done without problems, but I don’t see where to open the thing just as pointed out by you.
I didn’t see the “little blue arror will appear in the icon bar” too.
Anyone had any luck on “Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar” IE+Wine+Linux
Thanks to the Author of this Blog for this useful Article
The download link on microsoft wont work!!! Epic fail.
@Ben Crowther:
May be your ISP failed.