Tools of the Trade: DebugBar
It’s been a long time since I featured a Windows program here, but this one is definitely worth looking at. DebugBar is similar to the Firebug extension for Firefox, except that it works with Internet Explorer.
DebugBar adds a toolbar to IE, as well as a sidebar. With the toolbar you can toggle the sidebar, capture and email a screenshot of the browser, identify colours with the colour picker, resize the browser window, view the page source, and spy other instances of IE that are running.
The sidebar contains a DOM inspector, HTTP inspector, Javascript inspector, HTML validator, and a panel for general information, such as the URL of the current page, the page title, size of the page in bytes, etc.
There are similarities between this product and the Developer Toolbar put out by Microsoft, but I find DebugBar more user-friendly. For example, the DOM target tool, which you can drag to any part of the page to identify the specific HTML element, is a very useful inclusion and one sorely missing from Microsoft’s offering.
DebugBar is being actively developed and improved upon and is free for personal use. A license for commercial use, however, is going to set you back €59, which, in my opinion, is quite hefty, considering the Developer Toolbar is free. Still, it’s a great tool and worth checking out if you spend much time debugging websites in Internet Explorer.
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
can we edit the source code like firebug in firefox with this Debug bar. i tried IE developer toolbar but it can’t do.
Comment by Jitendra Vyas — February 14, 2009 @ 12:03 am
@Jitendra No, I don’t think you can make live edits with DebugBar.
Comment by Eric — February 14, 2009 @ 9:07 am