The Beta 1 Refresh of the IE Developer Toolbar

Sweet, off to download and install this today. You guys have no idea how much time I have saved just using the Beta 1 or just tracking down which div tag is causing me grief. This is such a great tool.

Curious though is this refreshed only at this location Linked or under my MSDN subscription as well.

This is such a great tool. A must for any web designer or developer. The new version is a lot less buggy. Good job!

New Feature Request: I would like to be able to edit my cookies. I can view them and delete them but I would like to edit them without going into the file. That would save me a lot of effort.

Patrons of Firefox who may be wondering why Firefox doesn't have a web developer toolbar should be happily surprised that Chris Pederick has for some time made the Web Developer toolbar extension available for Firefox at...

http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

The IE Web Developer toolbar is ok, not as pretty (but then again it's younger then it's Firefox competitor). Regardless there will be those who feel whatever is the default by default will be all they need and I hope this encourages such flyboys to clean their crappy code up! So ultimately I feel it is good that this toolbar is being worked on and effectively applaud MS and those who are working on it. It should do some justice to pushing the play button back on the boombox of progress as far as code goes online.

Too bad we designers (such as myself who are in college) don't have the $ to pay for a free preview of IE. Then again some changes are better then none?

Preview release of Opera 9 almost perfectly renders the Acid2 browser test now. I think the 1.9 Gecko engine will probally catch up to that extent (they finally made that test pass W3C validation btw which is why I mentioned it).

Additional features sounds nice, what will they include?

1.) Local uploads to validators would be much appreciated as a starter.

2.) Icon that indicates a page is being rendered in quirks/standards.

3.) Icon that indicates various levels of WAI/508 that are achieved and not.

"Enabling/disabling images no longer closes and reopens IE"

i just downloaded this from the link above and it's closing msie when i disable or enable iamges. i have to manually reopen msie. is that really a fix/desirable?

??
m.

I don't think your installer updated the toolbar because "Enabling/disabling images no longer closes and reopens IE" doesn't appear to be fixed. I even tried fully uninstalling it to no avail. I followed the link to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en

msp and netdragon, what version of IE are you using? I am unable to repro having to close and reopen IE for disable images to take effect.

It seems they forgot to update the download link. Current version of MSIE DevToolbar is 1.00.0912.0

Hey thanks for updating a few things. I wrote my initial review when this toolbar was released (http://c82.net/article.php?ID=23). It's a small update, but thanks for changing your "tag" references to "element." Small changes like that do show that you folks care which is good. I'm thrilled that outlining elements is much faster now (though displaying ID and class information is still rather slow). I also enjoy the magnifier in combination with the ruler. (Any chance on giving us controls for adjusting the modifier like magnification/viewing area?)

While the new changes are certainly nice, there are still quite a few things that I mentioned in my review that haven't been changed. Are you working on those since it's still a beta? One thing I didn't mention in my review but still want a great deal (and I'm not the only one) is the ability to outline anything. Outlining elements is great and speedy now but outlining elements based on their ID or class like #main or .info like the Firefox toolbar allows would be just as useful if not more so. I often have more need to do that than to outline all of one type of element.

The names in the drop-down menus could be improved as well. For example, in the disable, outline, view, and validate menus, almost everything is preceded by the name of the menu such as "Outline DIVs" or "View Access Keys." I would think that if you're clicking something saying "Outline," you don't need to have each option saying "Outline" again. It's redundant and kind of makes it difficult to pick out the one you want.

Not sure if you know this but IE seems to always crash when trying to validate sets of things like HTML and CSS.

Is it just me or is the option to disable the popup blocker checked when the toolbar is installed? I noticed this on two separate computers, on which I have the popup blocker enabled at all times. No fair being sneaky now...I truly don't want to see ads and junk!

Finally, how about some improvement on the overall appearance? I know it's beta but betas don't always have to look unpleasant. Try getting rid of that "DevToolbar" label/non-button thing and fix the resizing issue (resizing the browser window makes the DevToolbar hide other buttons instead of shrinking the giant space to the right of it). The tool windows need some help too. Maybe implement the XP visual styles and rearrange some things to make them more intuitive (and give us more color options when outlining elements)?

While typing this, I just noticed that when I tried changing the color for rulers, I can't pick a color. The color picker appears but I can't choose a color or click OK/Cancel. I can only close the window.

Those are just a few things I noticed when trying this new version out. I am glad you all made this and look forward to watching it develop. Just trying to help!

A color picker would be the icing on the cake for the toolbar. I would use it hourly.

I'm not sure if the download link is updated, but I had to restart my machine after installing the toolbar.

I've been using the firefox web developer toolbar for a while. This one is almost as useful, and some of the features are implemented better than in firefox (the validation is more smooth, the ruler is better, and the DOM browser opens in a more sensible place).

The major lacking is not being able to edit live css. This is the main reason I use the firefox toolbar, and it would be great to see this feature on the IE one. Also as was suggested above, a color picker would be great too.

All of these things are allready available in firefox (through extensions), so in order for me to make the switch to using the IE toolbar, it should be either able to do something unique, or at least do the same things in a more integrated way.

One feature that I feel is mising from the toolbar is the ability to outline all block level elements (not just divs or a given tag). If i'm trying to figure out why some bit of CSS isn't laying out right, I need to know all the block elements positions to accurately see what's going on.

Just wanted to note that the image disable option now no longer closes IE, but doesn't actually disable the images either. All it does it reload the current page.

While we're talking about developer tools, is there any effort to make debugging javascript easier in IE?

Everytime I see the especially annoying and uninformative "not an object or null" message in IE, along with a wrong line number and file name (it always gives the current page, not much use when several external scripts are used) I'm one step closer to just dropping IE from the cool but optional javascript parts of the sites I make.

A full debugger like Mozilla Venkman would be nice...

Is that I had to restart my Windows box!

I'm not usually a Windows/IE user but this seems bizare! Firefox requires a restart of the browser for some plugins, but a restart of the whole operating system? - what gives?!

I had to walk to the other side of the office to turn the Windows box back on too (we work on Linux and test sites over RDP)... what Microsoft department should I send the bill for extra worn down shoe tread to?

Is there any way to avoid the reboot for future reference?