Fugato

I tried out the “beta refresh” of Microsoft’s developer toolbar for Internet Explorer. It seemed a big relief that, after years of excellent developer support in Firefox with the Web Developer extension, we were finally getting the same in IE.

Well, not quite.

Toolbars mixed up

The toolbar did not appear after install and reboot. “Developer Toolbar” was checked in the View→Toolbars menu, but no dice. Oddly, the MSN Search toolbar did appear, but that was not checked in the View→Toolbars menu. So I unchecked “Developer Toolbar” and checked “MSN Search Toolbar” … yep, MSN Search toolbar vanished and Developer Toolbar appeared.

Outlining broken

Works here. Does nothing on another page on same site, and plenty more pages. I have not seen a pattern to this failure yet; maybe doctypes or client scripting matter.

View Class and ID Information

… for a medium-sized form page, takes close to half a minute, during which the IE window is hourglassed and “(Not Responding)”

Show Ruler

… works sometimes, sometimes not, just like outlining. But the kicker: it has the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-R, the same one I have been using to reload the page for years. Ctrl-R now pops a ruler in my face. On some pages. Others still reload.

DOM Explorer

… works, and that’s great, but it does not show me which CSS style rules apply to a given element and where they were specified. The Firefox DOM Inspector shows that and it is in-freakin’-valuable for troubleshooting layout. [Not a bug, you say? I say it's a requirements bug!]

I’ll skip other minor quibbles, except I want to mention a time-worn classic UI gaffe in the DOM Explorer: the File menu. What file operations does the toolbar offer? Well, none. This File menu has two items, “Refresh” and “Undo all”; it is being misused as a Misc menu. Doubly silly because there is also a menu named Misc.

Seems to me that this was an alpha. I am looking forward to the beta! :-)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 9:22 am and is filed under Microsoft, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.