Microsoft's Visual Studio doesn't do a horrible job of IE debugging. Just download the web dev Express version (free) and turn on script debugging in your Advanced Options.
Opera used to have its own debugging/inspection tool[1] as well. It was released in 2008, it was open-source[2] (unlike the browser), didn't required plugins like firebug at the time, had handy remote debugging, overall I enjoyed it the most. But it died with the browser. Honestly, I'm surprised it's still up somewhere.
Nice article. Not just for beginners either. Ive been debugging javascript since IE6 and didnt know about
"If you click the braces at the bottom of the developer tools, they will “pretty print” the code. It makes it a little bit more readable, but it’s still difficult to decipher.
They are on Firefox at least, I assume Chrome too, there's a Vue devtools extension for example that adds a tab alongside inspect, console, debugger, et al. to give you a sort of Vue-aware 'inspect'.
> Can anybody recommend a tool to look what Javascript code loaded by a certain page is doing?
Open your browser's developer tools, go to the Script/Debugger tab and have at it. It's just about as obtuse to use as a tool as gdb, but you'll see exactly what it does. Chrome dev tools has automatic formatting of the code, maybe firefox too. But you'll be stuck with shitty variable names if they been mangled. Although you could try http://www.jsnice.org/, I had variable luck with using it.
It would be interesting to have a browser tool that is like strace and you could filter by calls, so you can see exactly where window.navigator is being used for example, or localStorage.setItem. For now best you can do is searching for "navigator" which works, but can be minified/hidden away by coder as well.
This has worked on Firefox since the beginning of time. One could use the DOM inspector and venkman JS debugger, then Firebug chrome inspector and more recently the Firefox developer tools to inspect Firefox's XUL.
I haven't had to deal much with IE in the last couple of years, but when I did, the only sane way I found to debug JS code was to have Visual Studio installed, and to use the VS debugger to hook into JS code.
/works at Microsoft, but not on IE
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/07/29/debugging-and-...
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