Has anyone tested IE 8 developer toolbar ? is it really good like firebug?

Question

Has anyone tested IE 8 developer toolbar ? is it really good like firebug ?

Answer 1

A Good comparison between IE8 Developer Toolbar abd Firbug on Firefox is here

Answer 2

Really Good? No. Half decent? sure.

If you're used to Firebug then the IE8 dev toolbar won't compare. Don't get me wrong - there's actually a lot of good tools buried inside - but its not as complete IMHO.

Cons:

• No equivalent to the Firebug Net panel (e.g. you can't see that loading script X is slowing your site down)
• No YSlow (a plugin obviously - but I don't believe the IE8 toolbar is extendable)
• No color/image swatch rollovers when inspecting styles
• CSS tab is just a "dump" of properties... the view in the CSS tab in Firebug is much more usable since it reflects the same layout that you specified the selectors/properties in you CSS file
• Default view in Script tab is an HTML dump, not a list of scripts like in Firebug
• HTML Tab - "Edit" button lets you edit the REAL HTML in Firebug but in IE Dev Toolbar you "edit" the invalid HTML Tag Soup that IE generates
• Inspecting a DOM element in both shows the "Styles" on the right hand side. In Firebug the actual properties applied rise to the top, in IE they sink to the bottom - thus in IE if you want to see what styles are applied, get ready to scroll since all the ones at the top are strike-through.
• Adding Attributes on-the-fly in the IE8 toolbar "Attributes" section takes patience. If you press Enter when you are done typing your attribute value IE will happily erase your value AND your attribute. (you MUST click elsewhere to de-focus the edit box - HIGHLY ANNOYING!)

Pros:

• Script profiling is quite helpful in determining which functions/methods are your bottlenecks.
• Trace Styles (Conceptually this shows where a given style property was inherited from etc. I personally have not found it to be very reliable (and during the IE8 beta phase - it failed completely)

Answer 3

Depends on what you need. Lacks - for example - the ability to track HTTP headers and is not easily extendable like FireBug.

Answer 4

I haven't tried using it since the Beta but I remember it crashing if you had a page with too much stuff on like a table with a thousand plus rows.

One nice feature is the ability to change the rendering mode to see how you page would behave in IE7

Answer 5

It is great to get the formatting right, and debug scripts for IE specific issues. Else Firebug is better IMHO.

Answer 6

Different tools for different jobs. You can't run FireBug on IE, so when you are trying to tune your page to IE, you will use the Developer Toolbar. Likewise, the DT doesn't run on FireFox, so you'll have to use FireBug for optimizing there.