The Lair

A bit of a nothing post, really – but I thought it would be moderately useful to document the development tools for the three four major browsers that are available in the Windows world.

Firefox – use Firebug. Nuff said. Honestly, this is pretty much all you need. It allows pretty much everything that you’d need for JavaScript, CSS and general mucking around with pages. Perhaps Web Developer comes close; but nothing else does. There are lots more development extensions related extensions for Firefox; Google should reveal the more obvious candidates.

Internet Explorer – use the Developer Toolbar for Internet Explorer. It’s by Microsoft, it’s free. Not great, but it does the job. Non-free but closer to Firebug in functionality, IE Inspector offers a couple of tools which function as Internet Explorer addons. The debugger is sort of weird, but it works. IE is still inscrutable to me though. No browser gives me as many headaches with layouts.

Opera – there are plenty of tools for developers in the Tools Section – I actually like the DOM tool implemented by Opera more than I do the equivalents in other browsers. That’s purely a matter of personal taste, though.

Safari – just enable the debug menu. It is disabled and hidden by default, but enabling is just a matter of setting the right preference. On the Mac, however – you’d need to use the defaults utility – on Windows, you’d need to edit the Preferences.plist file as explained here. The debug menu on Windows contains a user agent switcher, a JavaScript console and couple of other features (Snippets? Site Specific Hacks?) that I haven’t quite worked out yet. The JS console is pretty much essential of course – the Webkit JavaScript implementation is somewhat strange (and has never worked for me, despite targetting KHTML/Konqui).

I still think Firefox edges it for sheer breadth of development tools available, but the more you know eh?

So, a couple of days ago – I decided that I would try out the day without Google. Well, the challenge was specifically a day without the 5 major search engines, but in my case – that means el Goog.

I don’t have any toolbars or home page settings to Google, in fact – I only use Google in one very simple, specific way. I have a Smart Bookmark which allows me to type something like this …

google alternate search engines

on my Firefox address bar – yielding the Google SERP for alternative search engines.

Clearly, I knew that muscle memory would win out if I left the smart bookmark unchanged, so at the start of the day – I edited the Google bookmark to search Clusty instead. To make the test complete; I also disabled my smartmark searches for Google Images, Google News and Google Groups. I also wired in additional smartmarks for Alltheweb and Hakia. I would have also loved to use Powerset, but alas – they don’t have a public search offering just yet.

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Go get it

Yeah, yeah, Firefox and Opera rule. I know it, so do you. But Safari uses a customized version of KHTML; the engine also used by Konqueror. More to the point, Safari also has quite a few quirks in how it seems to handle JS; at least the brand of JS that I write – so I’m looking forward to testing out some of my code on Safari.

And oh, they say it’s blazingly fast. [cue Slashdot response: but does it run on Linux?]

Update 1: Requires administrator privileges to install? A browser? Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell are you, Internet Explorer?

Update 2: Multiple vulnerabilities found. So, I shouldn’t be using Safari anymore, huh?