Test driving Internet Explorer beta 2 developer tools
I’ve been playing with the IE8 developer tools and what at first seemed like a promising new UI utility has revealed itself as rather under-whelming and run of the mill. Sure it has typical features such CSS editing and image highlighting, but where’s the state of the art, move the web forward functionality we were expecting? Maybe I’m being delusional and that’s too much to expect from Microsoft!
The good
The mode switcher is awesome! To have the ability to see how code responds between Quirks Mode and Standards Mode is really handy, especially since IE’s rendering is so different between the two. It’s ironic that the developer tool’s best feature is only there due to its own shortcomings over the years.
Other nice features:
- Outline tab indexes and access keys
- Outline any element you want
- Outline positioned elements based on value
The bad
I’ve only scrutinized the CSS/HTML tools, but many not-so-positive things jump out even after just a few bug fix attempts.
- The Select Element by Click option is buried in a drop-down menu. There should be a button or key-command or a right-click menu option (actually, all three!).
- CSS style hierarchy pane descends when it should ascend. In the styles pane, the element styles line up from the very top of the cascade hierarchy to the bottom. More often than not, I’m going to want to see the very last styles that are applied to an element first and not the very top level styles on the BODY tag. Every time I select an item I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the styles pane.
- There is no way to delete elements from the html. FireBug offers the ability to delete elements completely and this is a very handy function for bug hunting by using the process of elimination. IE8 dev team should implement this feature.
- Edit html changes don’t stick until leaving edit html mode.
It wasn’t my intention to compare it to FireBug, but I couldn’t help it since that is a tool I use quite often.
The buggy
It’s only a beta version but man is it buggy! Usually from anywhere within five to twenty options selected or styles deselected, the tool begins to slowly or dramatically lose functionality. Either the style pane completely goes white or the edits to styles stop showing up in the browser window.
Conclusion
If the developers of the IE8 development tools can fix the bugs in their tool and improve its usability, they’ll have a very handy tool to contribute to the community. If not, then they’ll simply be doing what they’ve always done…take something that they can really shine on and underachieve. I am still pulling for them to blow my socks off, but still have that simmering feeling that they will let me down once again.
[...] moment of stress! It began when I decided to Google the title of my most recent blog posting, Test driving Internet Explorer beta 2 developer tools. When the results came back, there were many postings with similar titles (to be expected) but one [...]