How to debug a IE8 client-side issues for a website?

Question

One of my website's users is experiencing Javascript problems with his IE8/WinXP setup, with code execution apparently aborting halfway through, but there are no alert boxes or other hints as to why and I'm unable to replicate the problem locally. How can I get any information out of his system, so I can start debugging this?

Just figuring out where the code aborts would be very helpful, but AFAIK IE8 doesn't have anything like Firefox's Error Console that just logs warnings. I know IE8 has Developer Tools built-in, but is it of any use if the user is not a developer?

The following question suggests logging in remotely to the client's system, but I'm not sure this will be possible to arrange.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/632271/how-to-remotely-debug-customer-issues-with-a-website

Answer 1

IE7/IE8 has an addon named developer tools and its real good (comparable to FireBug for FireFox) and you can do all debug, watch etc for your javascript on clientside.

See a similar (duplicate?) post on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3263628/firebug-alternative-for-the-ie/3263654#3263654

Answer 2

IE 8 dev tools are rather handy, but I don't think they would be of any help to a non-developer... You could potentially ask him to install them, start the debugger, and have it break on all errors. But even that is likely too technical for a non developer. Also you'd be stuck asking him to describe exactly where and how the error was occurring.

Getting physical or remote access to his machine would be the best option. Also ensure you have explicit instructions to reproduce the error, just in case you're missing something locally.

One final option would be to add logging into your javascript to catch and record errors, perhaps they would give you some clues.

Answer 3

You can still ask the person to open the developer tools, go to the scripts tag and start debugging. Even he doesn't know what it means you might get helpful information when some code gets hit by an exception.

In the past we usually went to that client to help him/her out.

Most of the times it turned out to be that some script didn't get loaded properly or not in time.

Answer 4

The user can turn on Javascript logging in IE8, if they are tech-savvy enough. (It's not hard, but we all know how good users normally are with computers...):

Get them to go to Internet Options -> Advanced. There is a "Display a notification about every script error" option, which should be checked. This should now cause all Javascript errors to be logged - you can view them, iirc, by clicking on a yellow warning triangle which will appear on websites where there is broken Javascript (aka, almost every website in the world...). The user could then copy this information to you.

It does rely on the user being fairly tech-savvy - you really just want to get at their machine tbh.