During the creation of my websites, I develop solely in Firefox. When it comes to testing, I run it through IE tester. One thing that I really miss is my Firebug.
Enter Firebug Lite
Firebug Lite is a stripped down version of Firebug. For the details of the current release, look at the firebug lite features.
For my code, I decided to only include the firebug lite code from their distribution when not in production. This is how I do it in my code:
1 2 3 | if (!ENVIRONMENT_LIVE && strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== false) { echo '<script type="text/javascript" src="http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/1.2/firebug-lite-compressed.js"></script>'; } |
In this case, whenever the code is not in production and the agent is a version of Internet Explorer, the code is loaded.
Issues with Firebug Lite
Regular Firebug has spoiled me. The lite version has a few issues:
- The inspect feature is somewhat quirky. Sometimes it clicks links instead of selecting the DOM element. It also has a delay.
- The CSS view shows the whole entire computed style, not just items you’ve added.
- You can’t do any inline editing of elements in the DOM tree.
Overall, its a real nice addition to my IE debugging back.
Thanks for the tip. I remember seeing that firebug was available for ie when I first go into it, but since have completely forgotten about it.