An Introduction to the IE8 Developer Tools

As part of my ongoing roundup of all things IE8 in celebration of its final release, in this video I take a look at the developer tools built into IE8. As well as helping you debug your HTML and CSS layout, they offer interactive editing of the HTML document and CSS, outlining of elements and validation. Javascript support includes a fully-featured debugger and even a profiler allowing me to see where time is being spent in the execution of my code. Finally, the browser and document mode features allow you to switch the rendering mode (IE8, IE7, IE8 in compatibility view) and document mode (standards, quirks) for the current document.

And yes, I’m afraid it has another cheesy start. And I realised after I published that the @ symbol has disappeared from below my blog URL – so what’s supposed to be my Twitter name instead just looks like I wanted to write my name on the screen again!

Out of interest, this video was recorded using Camtasia 4 to record a Remote Desktop window connected to my “home” PC running Windows Vista with IE8. The reason for this slightly complex setup? I’m running Windows 7 Beta on my work machine. The version of IE8 in Windows 7 Beta is now quite dated (and can’t be updated to IE8 RTW) and there are some differences in the developer tools between the two. Thanks to Liam who was the one that suggested this solution to me. It saved me creating another VM.

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