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Little things you may not have noticed in IE8: Part 2 – Formatted View Source

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Formatted View Source

imageYou don’t have to be a pro developer to love this one. Since the very beginning, IE has relied on the built-in Notepad editor to show page source. Notepad, it should be noted is not a source viewer.

In IE8, for the first time, the IE team itself took on ownership of the core development experience, making a deep investment in built-in developer tools. In the past, the developer experience belonged to the Visual Studio team (and the professional developer is still well-served by using that product for end-to-end development), but with the experience with the intern-developed Developer toolbar in IE7, the team realized that there is a place for a lightweight, built-in set of development tools.

A great side-effect of the deep work is that the team developed a great source viewer, and hooked it up as the default “View Source” app.

Bonus tip: If you have a better app  (Notepad++ has been my standby for years) for source viewing/editing, don’t forget you can always change the editor to anything else by using the Programs tab in Internet Options. For my needs, however, I don’t think I’ll need anything more.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2008
    The new source viewer (part of IE8 dev tools) is great, especially because it shows all the HTML tags as in FrontPage or any other HTML Editor. If someone wants to revert back to Notepad as the default viewer, editing the "View Source EditorEditor Name"  key would suffice. ( Ref: http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/default-view-source-editor-changed-in-ie8/ )