Firebug for Internet Explorer

Nov 2, 2009 ide-and-web-dev-tools

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

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:

if (!ENVIRONMENT_LIVE && strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== false) {
  echo '<script src="http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/1.2/firebug-lite-compressed.js" type="text/javascript"></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.