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Developer Toolbar Refresh

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As some of you noticed the developer toolbar ceased to function in the refresh preview build of IE7 made available earlier this week. We made some changes that affected the dev toolbar so we shipped a newer version to line up with the new build of IE7. A refresh of beta 2 of the developer toolbar is now available that will function in the latest available builds of IE7 as well as IE6.

As always we really appreciate all feedback on the developer toolbar. This tool for web developers is currently at beta 2 as we fix the final bugs before releasing version 1. We’ve got a few ideas on what we should add in version 2. What would you like to see?

Thanks

 - Dave

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    Great, tools like these make the life of a developer a lot better!! Can't wait for the final version :)
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    Looks like they came out just as I needed them today! :)

    I also had to go into 'Manage Add-ons...' and approve 'Developer Toolbar' and 'IE DOM Explorer', was this by design or possibly just something on machine?
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    Any chance of releasing the toolbar source code once finalised for IE7 so anyone has the opportunity of adding there own features, using the exiting code as inspiration??
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    Due to the Internet Explorer 7 Beta Refresh, released earlier this week the Internet Explorer Developer...
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    I somehow can't get it to work. After installation the option appears in View -> Toolbars but when i activate the toolbar by clicking on it nothing happens.
    IE version 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    The developer toolbar is certainly a big help when debugging and building websites.  There are two things that seem lacking to me:

    - A way a viewing the rendered source.  This can be particularly useful when using lots of JavaScript to update the page at runtime

    - Built-in JavaScript debugging and AJAX logging, as seen in the Firefox extension Firebug

    Both of these capabilities are incredibly helpful when building complicated web applications, and without them, developers will be more comfortable developing in Firefox and complaining later on if it doesn't work in IE.  
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    > We’ve got a few ideas on what we should add in version 2. What would you like to see?

    Just keep on ripping DOM Inspector / Web Developer Extension features off. ;)
    You may also take a look at FireBug. It's pretty useful ... https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=1843
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    thx

    It's grear if there has some buttons like "view all scripts", "view all style sheets", "view all images" under "misc" menu. lol
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    Good tools for web developer, thank you!
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    If I have a menu open, I should be able to hover over another menu item and have that one open. But I have to double click.

    Is this temporary? I think it should work like the classic menu in IE7.

    Also, it looks kind of boring...any chance of having some icons like in the firefox developer toolbar? I like that toolbar, but I don't like firefox. I'd like something (exactly) like that in IE.
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    After I click "Show Ruler," it would be nice if the text changed to "Hide Ruler" because that's what it does.
    Or, you could use a checkbox.
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    An option to display the CSS margin/border/padding of an element would be really great. Like Macrobe Dreamweaver 8 do, for instance.

    (This would be very useful to identify which element should be given layout, when strange things happen ;) ).
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    For the next version I'd like:

    1) A way to live edit CSS
    2) Viewing rendered source (after JS/DOM updates to the outputted markup)
    3) DOM logging like the Firefox extension Firebug

    Thanks for listening.
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    It would be really great if you could provide us with a change log documenting the changes made to the IE platform. This would help other toolbar/plug-in developers to make their applications compatible with IE7.

    I am now quite curious what particular change caused the dev toolbar ceasing to function.

    Sharing that kind of information would help us, developers, a lot and would save us hours of testing.

    Thanks

    Viktor
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
  1. Color Picker MUST show hexadecimal color numbers, such as ff0000, a0a0a0 and so on. Or it should'n be there at all; without hex numbers it's only useless exasperation.

    2. Disabling images sometimes doesn't work, especially for some images embedded through CSS.
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    > Color Picker MUST show hexadecimal color numbers, such as ff0000, a0a0a0 and so on. Or it should'n be there at all; without hex numbers it's only useless exasperation.

    There's rgb(), so you can use these numbers directly.

    Besides, it would be great if IE supported rgba().
    Just dreaming ...
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    Ah, and if you click "copy and close", the Color Picker generates hex values anyway.
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    Something to indicate whether IE is employing quirks or standards mode for the current page rendering.
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    It would be nice to be able to copy node properties in DOM viewer. Plus, you seem to not be using the right-click menu at all. Add more functions to it. ;)
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    well, it would be nice if the dom explorer actually worked. when i press "View Dom" absolutely nothing happens. any ideas what might be causing this?

    WM_QUERY
    thomas woelfer
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    [OT]

    just went to send a hallmark e-card, and noticed that under IE7 the whole page seems to flicker when i mouse over the images.

    http://www.hallmark.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/category2|10001|10051|-102001|-2;-102001|products|E-Cards
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    [question about toolbars in general]

    Can the IE team address the 'missing or swapped toolbar' issue?

    According to <a href='http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555130'>MSDN 555130</a> this is specific to XP... and I've reproduced swapped toolbars in IE 7.0.5335.5 on XP Pro SP2.  Since the only fix is to delete HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerToolbarWebBrowserITBarLayout (ITBar7Layout for IE7) it's quite difficult to manage in an enterprise environment.  Thanks.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    > ...to be able to copy node properties in DOM viewer

    Second the motion. Especially innerHtml for me.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Another vote for live CSS editing.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Even if I don't like IE 7, I really appreciate IE dev toolbar.

    Thank you Microsoft for making it easier for web developers to write workarounds for IE 6 and IE 7.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Dreamweaver 8 has an interesting functionality that I think could be expanded upon.  Basically you can select any element and it will tell you something like "color: #336699, set by rule #nav A.blue_link"
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Here, use the new developer toolbar to fix <a href="http://www.alistapart.com/d/horizdropdowns/littlebetter.htm">this</a> bug while your at it.

    I'll give you a hint... it's been a bug since the beginning.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    "3. A css inheritance display similar to what the Accessability Toolbar used to have. Let me click on an object and pop-up a window that tells me every CSS attribute and tell me from whence it got that attribute. If it was specified as a style directiv"

    +1

    This would make it great realy usable and maybe live css too?
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    The IE team released the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview build to coincide with the MIX06 conference....
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    It would be great if you could view Session cookies --  thanks.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Ben: For what it's worth, to view the active session cookies, you can just type

    javascript: alert(document.cookie);

    in the IE addressbar.  Hit CTRL+C to copy.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Thanks Eric ... I wasn't aware of that.  However for some reason that snippet of JavaScript doesn't seem to show all cookies.

    I have an ASP.NET website that uses a session cookie and a persistent cookie.  [javascript: alert(document.cookie);] showed the persistent cookie, but did not show the session cookie.  Possibly that JavaScript snippet only shows the first cookie?  Both cookies are saved under the same domain name.

    In Firefox, I can see both cookies under Tools | Options | Privacy | Cookies | View Cookies ... so I know the session cookie exists for sure.

    For this reason, it would be very helpful if the IE developer toolbar also showed session cookies.

    Thx again - Ben
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    > Possibly that JavaScript snippet only shows the first cookie?

    No.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    For the next version, I'd like to see an option to view the rendered source chart, similar to this FireFox extension:

    http://jennifermadden.com/scripts/ViewRenderedSource.html
  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2006
    It appears that IE 6.0 simply doesn't show session cookies with the javascript:alert(document.cookie); command.  Another site I went to which uses only a single session cookie didn't show anything in IE when using the above JavaScript command.  Firefox does, however, show all cookies (persisted and session) with the same JavaScript.

    Regards, Ben
  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2006
    I'd like to see a feature that lets you monitor IE memory for a url to see if your javascript-based app is leaking memory.
  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2006
    Http Headers would be nice.

    Page File Size ... would be nice to know how big the entire page is (add up the image file sizes, css , scripts, html, etc...)

    Thank you for making this... i've missed the old IE 5.5 developer toolbar.

    Allowing developers to add their own plugins would be nice as well.

    CSS editing would be amazing!
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2006
    I build applications that make extensive use of modal dialog boxes (no toolbars). Last time I installed the devtoolbar, I loved it, but couldn't use in on most of my pages.

    It would be nice if there were an icon in the title bar (or an option in the system menu off the application icon in the title bar) that would give me access to the features of the devtoolbar.
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2006
    There are some DOM attributes that are equivalent but where one or another is the "standard" or "recommended" one to use. (This is from memory, but I think that nodeName and tagName are examples of this, and maybe some of the offsetX-, clientX-type attributes.) I think one use of the DOM viewer by developers will be to look up "what's the name of that attribute I want to check/change?" (I'm not ashamed to admit I've used it that way.) It might be a good idea, when the use of one attribute vs. another is considered a best practice, to color-code them differently or in some way indicate to developers which are the preferred ones to frob and which are just present for backwards compatibility.
  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2006
    Hi,

    I would really like to see a feature which would outline the padding and margin of an element separately. It would make css debugging so much easier.. Does anybody know of any other tools capable of this?

    Regards,
    Tuk
  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2006
    As someone else mentioned, make it act like a real menu when hovering and stuff.  And I've never seen a menu bar in an MS product that 1) has a text label for the menu bar (that looks like all the other menue items) or 2) has a button that looks just like a menu item.

    Better would be a toolbar button with a dropdown menu containing all these items.  (Of course it would probably get installed in the least convenient place imaginable and not be relocatable!)
  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2006
    Keyboard Shortcuts!
    More Keyboard Shortcuts!

    With the Firefox Web Developer toolbar, I can do a quick "control+shift+A" to validate my HTML against validator.w3.org.  With the IE toolbar, I have to click through menus.

    I am validating local HTML because I am behind a firewall/proxy.

    Customization options such the ability to "elevate" or "promote" any command so that it appears directly on the toolbar itself -- for those actions that you perform all the time.

    And a little dressing up so that it looks as good as Mr Pederick's toolbar ;-).
  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2006
    A way for the toolbar to auto-update itself, when new versions are released.  Or at least a "check for updates" option under "Misc".

    This is easy in Firefox, of course.  With this IE toolbar, I find myself having to manually check microsoft.com for updates (and then trying to remember when I last downloaded it, since the website does not show the version number).
  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2006

    We are currently locking down IE7 for shipping and I wanted to give an update on the CSS work that...
  • Anonymous
    August 23, 2006
       Everybody who has done any cross-browser web development is aware of the many&amp;#160;quirks of IE6,...
  • Anonymous
    October 06, 2006
    PingBack from http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/10/06/getting-your-blog-ready-for-internet-explorer-7/