Wrestling with MSIE

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

I'm relatively new to serious JavaScript, being in the middle of my first largish application right now. I'm finding, as I think many people have before me, that coding for Firefox and debugging with Firebug is a joy, but then if I test on IE and find that things don't work, it can be agonizing to figure out why.

I've tried the "Microsoft Script Debugger" and found it truly wretched -- it usually hangs stepping around XmlHttpRequest calls, for example, and generally misbehaves in many other ways. Surely there must be something better? How do you figure out where IE is going wrong?

[Eric Pascarello]

You can infect your machine with Visual Studio!

Eric

[Bear Bibeault]

I have no good news for you.

My version of IE6 will not even show debugging errors, regardless of what the Advanced settigns are configure to.

It's dreadful.

[Gregg Bolinger]

The only advice I can give is to use try/catch EVERYWHERE. Especially around ajax calls and there completing function(s). Then you can actually spit out semi-meaningful messages:

try
{
  ...
}
catch(e)
{
   alert(e.message);
   alert(e.lineNumber);
}

Versus the good old "Warning: Object expected null Line 1" crap.

[Eric Pascarello]

IF you are WILLING to infect your machine you can install Visual Web Developer Express

http://asp.net/downloads/essential.aspx?tabid=62

You add a debugger; statement to the code and it will allow you to use it. I use Visual Studio to debug things, but I normally go the classic alert model.

Eric

[Chris Cornelius]

You might try this:

http://www.getfirebug.com/lite.html

I have yet to try it myself, but it has got to be better than the alternatives.

Chris