mkval.blogspot: Debugging Tool for Internet Explorer Browsers

Working with IE Browsers more specially with IE6 is such a tough job for us web developers and designers. As of this time, this piece of browser haven't been totally eradicated and would surely be hanging around for some time. My guess would be two to three years more. Or perhaps worse than that. Although I've been seeing more and more sites who are dropping support against IE6.

Most of the time, I build my projects using Firefox browser. I do my CSS, HTML, and Javascript debugging with the help of Firebug and Web Developer plugins. But the process doesn't end there. Somehow, when you're through getting your application work in FF, you wanna go see what it looks like in IE. Mostly, the results would only be frustrating.

So for projects really requiring IE6 support, well good for us because there are still genius people out there who still strive to provide great developer tools for us to get our job done. Just recently, I found myself one which I've been googling around for about two weeks now (not that I've been doing it 24/7). Anyways, the tool's name is DebugBar, a developer toolbar designed for IE5, IE6, IE7, and IE8.

Here's what it looks like. When installed, it resides conveniently at the left side of the browser.

Below are some of its remarkable features:

DOM Inspector: View DOM Tree and modify tag attributes and CSS attributes on the fly to test your page.
HTTP Inspector: View HTTP/S request to check cookies, GET and POST parameters, view server info.
Javascript Inspector and Javascript Console: View Javascript functions for easier debugging, see Javascript and AJAX code.
HTML Validator: Validate HTML code to correct and optimize your code and HTML size of your page.
And many more features: See page cookies, get pixel color on a page, make a page screenshot...

After installing DebugBar, you can enable this by going to Views -> Explorer Bar -> Debugbar.

If you're developing under Windows Vista Platform like me, you might be needing IE6 browser for testing your application. For this, check out their IETester Tool. This would spare you from downloading and installing a 30Mb Virtual PC plus 1.5Gb VPC Image from Microsoft. Here's a link to the blog that explains the latter.