Is there a better developer toolbar for IE8?

Question

I've been pulling my hair out for the last few hours trying to wrestle with the IE8 developer toolbar while working with some styles not playing with IE7 mode properly...

Coming over from Firebug the difference is like... well lets just say its better then nothing.

What I'm wondering is, has there been any.. additions, patches, hacks, updates etc to improve the toolbar at all in IE8? It seems, like with most things associated with the IE line, this was really done as an afterthought and not much effort was put into making it work well...

Update: So I was, it seems, not specific enough.. here is what is annoying me about the IE offerings:

• Style support - yeah, it is there, but it just doesn't feel right. It isn't easy to see the inheritance, and if you want to tweak an existing style you have to go into Attributes and add an override to the element.
• HTML element location. This just seems a LOT cleaner in Firebug
• Scrolling - If you have an element selected in the HTML pane, and you goto scroll in the CSS pane on the right it wont happen until you focus that pane.

Most of all its just the small annoyances - I think I've been too spoiled by Firebug, and I want it in IE - but considering the 'closed'-ness of the product it would be hard to get this rectified. To be honest, if I could contribute I would, because it would make my life so much easier - but... yeah.

Answer 1

You're looking at Firebug Lite. See: http://getfirebug.com/lite.html

You can just install it easily onto your web page and it'll work just like Firebug on Firefox.

Answer 2

Tools may not help in this case as readily as you may wish. Here is Position Is Everything, a site that addresses some of the hacks required Internet Explorer. I have used IETester for IE 6 issues, but not for IE 8.

Good luck. IE issues really suck. If you're dealing with Sharepoint and it's mess of html and css I feel for you dude! If not, be thankful.

Answer 3

Not sure what specific issues you are trying to debug, but the following tools all work well for their specific purposes:

Fiddler2 - HTTP Debugging Proxy - if you want to see what files are called, loaded, how, headers etc. this is the tool you want.

IE Tester - If you want to see how your site renders in IE6, IE7, IE8 without installing a bunch of virtual machines (or different PCs) this is a very good tool (not perfect, but very good)

DebugBar - Similar to the IE dev toolbar (but its been around much longer) it will let you inspect/alter various aspects of the HTML/CSS/JavaScript.