Information Gift

Hanging with the Moz

I've been meaning for some time to write an overview of features present in Mozilla that can help developers debug and analyze sites—Henrik Gemal's beaten me to it with his aptly named and well done article, Using Mozilla in Testing and Debugging Web Sites.

If you are a web developer, do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes looking over Henrik's article. Even if you're a die-hard IE user (you know who you are), after reading his article I'll bet you'll be opening Mozilla for access to the rich toolset it provides for the web developer community.

Henrik's article covers and compares to Win IE the range of simple to complex tools available in Mozilla such as the Javascript Console, Page Info, Cookie Management, colorized source view and the Cache Manager to the Javascript Debugger, DOM Explorer, and useful extensions like the livehttpheaders add-on, which can display your http traffic stream in a view window.

Another simple feature available since Mozilla 1.1 that slipped my notice until reading Henrik's article: View Selection Source (via context-menu) allows you to select and view the html source of dynamically written content—anyone who has used Javascript to write out HTML knows how difficult it can be to debug your rendering, since all you ever see in your source view are the document.writes. It's also handy for hilighting and jumping quickly to a section of a page that's being difficult.

You'll have to stick with the standard Mozilla builds for this last bit of functionality as the latest Netscape builds do not support View Selection Source.

Ran across this by way of Blogzilla. You can guess on what subject this blog focuses. ;)