How to force IE7 toolbars to always show

Question

I have the developer toolbar for IE7, which is great when I want to inspect the page layout in a fashion similar to the functionality of firebug for firefox.

However I am working with a web site that opens a new window with the toolbars disabled, and I cannot access my dev toolbar button! Is there a way to force IE7 to always show the toolbar?

Answer 1

I don't believe you can.

You can recover the navigation toolbar (back, forward, address bar, search box) in a chromeless window (one opened without navigation toolbar, menus, other toolbars) by hitting F11, then F11 again, but that still doesn't give you access to the IE Developer Toolbar.

What will sometimes work is to hit CTRL+N while the new, chromeless window has focus. Doing that will open a new chromed (toolbars, menus, etc) to the same URL as the chromeless window. The trick won't work very well if the chromeless window URL is the result of a POST, or does a GET that modifies state in some way on the server.

Answer 2

IE8 has the dev toolbar built-in, so you can always access it via F12. Consider upgrading?

Answer 3

I imagine that this happens because the pop-up window is opened using a javascript window.open() call specifying not to have the toolbars on the new window?

One possibility is opening the page source, finding the javascript call that opens the window, and pasting it into the address bar, modifying it to not disable toolbars.

For example, if the call currently looks like:

window.open(url, "newWindow", "toolbar=no,width=500,...");

Edit the address bar to read something like:

javascript:window.open(url, "newWindow", "toolbar=yes,width=500,...");

When you push enter on that, it should pop up the window just the same, but with toolbars.