stuart test blog

I spotted this last week and have been really impressed with Microsoft’s new IE developer’s toolbar (screenshot below – click to enlarge.) I’m a long time Firefox user and try to avoid using IE as much as possible, but as a part-time web developer it’s always important to test website in a number of different browsers. That, and our company OWA site are the only reasons I use IE, but this toolbar has kept me going back to IE several times over the last week to disect a particular webpage.

Chris Pederick’s Web Developer toolbar for Firefox (which is always one of the first extensions I install) does a similar job – and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the IE version is a blatant ripoff – but the IE toolbar is superior in some regards. The first thing is that when you display ID & class details in Firefox it sometimes pushes the page out of position, whereas the IE toolbar merely lays the details on top of the existing elements. But the coolest feature of the IE toolbar has to be the ruler! You can drag and drop and resize the ruler on your webpage and choose to have it snap to the elements on the page, and also to the X & Y axis to enable you to draw straight lines easily.

Overall, Chris’s Firefox version has way more features, but this is definitely worth checking out – it may even give you a valid reason to use IE! Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads….