Debugging Websites in Various Browsers

Question

I am having my first foray into website design and I am learning a lot. I am also now seeing why web developers are not a huge fan of developing for Internet Explorer. Nothing seems to work how I expect. However, since the website has to work cross-browser, I am spending time looking at it in Firefox, Chrome, and IE. Something that is very non-obvious to me, however, is how to tell where problems lie in the website.

For example, the layout of one of my pages forces a footer to the bottom of the page. It looks great in Chrome and Firefox, but there's something broken in IE that make the footer align to the right (and cause a horizontal scroll to appear). I have played around with the code, but nothing really is responding to how I want in IE (even though it does in other browsers).

Are there any tools that can help "debug" the problems on a web site so fixing it is more than just a trial-and-error approach? Thanks.

Answer 1

One of my favorites that works in all browsers is X-Ray. You simply stick the link on that page into a bookmark and it loads some external JavaScript on top of the page you're testing. It reveals a bunch of parameters about the DOM object you click on, as well as its hierarchy in the model.

As for your specific footer problem, I would look to a potential lack of clearing of floats and divs that are wider than their parent containers somewhere up the line.

Answer 2

A cross-browser JavaScript library, like jQuery and its UI components, can be very helpful in avoiding idiosyncrasies between browsers. Microsoft provides the IE Developer Toolbar, it's not quite as easy to use as Firebug, but can still be very helpful. A Just-In-Time debugger like MS Script Debugger or Visual Studio are also a time saver.

Answer 3

There are frameworks like GWT, ext-js, YUI which hide a lot of the browser bugs from you. But today (near the end of 2009), there still isn't a good, realiable way to narrow down browser issues and to fix them.

PS: I'm collecting tools that help during debugging here: Which tools do you use to debug HTML/JS in your browser?

Answer 4

I like Firebug for Firefox and IE8 has Developer Tools from the tools menu and IE Developer Toolbar for older versions. Chrome has similar tools from the page menu.

All of which allow you to see elements on the page as they are rendered in their specific browsers, which I usually find very helpful in debugging browser specific problems.

Answer 5

I assume you have checked that your code is valid, with

• HTML validator, for example: W3C Markup Validation Service
• CSS checker, for example: W3C CSS Validation Service

And, of course, you should have correct doctype in your html file. Without doctype, some browsers go to quirks mode to emulate bugs in old browsers.