The Beta 1 Refresh of the IE Developer Toolbar

Hello, my name is Jeff Varga and I am an intern from U.C. Berkeley on the IE team.  One of my projects this fall is to help build the IE Developer Toolbar into a great product for the IE community.

We are pleased to release the beta 1 refresh of the IE Developer Toolbar. The community feedback was incredibly helpful in finding a lot of problems and in planning for new functionality. We’ve combed through the replies to the initial release blog post and on the IE wiki at Channel 9. Please keep the feedback coming as it really helps.

The following is a list of fixes and new features in this latest update:

Bug fixes

• We have fixed element bounding box calculations to be accurate
• Outlining of elements is now significantly faster
• We have fixed the image report crash
• The installer no longer asks you to reboot (Beta 1 users will still be prompted to reboot because the Beta 1 Refresh installer invokes the Beta 1 uninstaller).  We hate reboots as much as anyone!
• The “Resize” option no longer causes confusion with the state of the maximize/minimize buttons in IE
• The “Select element by click” bounding box is now more visible on pages with blue backgrounds
• The attributes editor (middle pane) now has variable width fields (e.g. you can type beyond the width of the box)
• A few fixes to get around some pages never firing OnDocumentComplete
• We’ve fixed the consistency of using “element” rather than “tag” in the menus (thanks to everyone who pointed out this one)
• Scrolling and using the ruler now works better
• Enabling/disabling images no longer closes and reopens IE
• The installer now puts more options on the resize menu by default
• Editing a property no longer lets keystrokes “leak” back to IE and navigate without the user expecting it
• Trying to use the ruler while IE is in “folder mode” should no longer crash the browser

New features and functionality

• Default styles (in the third pane) are now shown in gray to offset them from the explicit styles
• The ruler dialog is always populated with the ruler information if there is just one ruler
• The ruler dialog now has information on how to invoke the less discoverable features
• “Undo all” reverts the page to the initial state
• Remove all outlines

 - Jeff

Edit: Fixed a typographical error.