Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta 3

Posted on January 9, 2007 No Comments

This thing rocks. Seriously, it leaves the previous betas of this developer toolbar in the dust.

The hilights?

UI Update - no more toolbar, now just one button up top on the “command bar” (that newly svelte menu bar like thing) that toggles a bottom panel full of tools.

One click access to the more commonly used tools

Style Tracer - See style at a glance for the selected element. Want to know where that style came from? Right click and “Trace Style.”
View Source - Viewing source of currently selected element is just … too dang cool. If nothing else, it sure helps with div matching. Basically, all the content is stripped out except for the selected element. However, all the block level tags are still there. I sure could’ve used this when I was tracking down an extra closing <div> a couple weeks ago.

I tend to use IE7 most of the time at work while developing. Most of our clients are non-technical, so I try to develop and unit-test with the same browser they’re likely to be using. While the previous iterations of the dev toolbar were OK, I’d usually fall back to Firefox when push came to shove, just to use Firebug and/or Web Developer (new release today, by the way).

I may not do that as often now. After playing with beta 3 for just 15 minutes I’m optimistic that it’ll be very useful in my day to day stuff.