Developer Toolbar for IE6/7
Microsoft has launched a free IE toolbar for web developers according to the Microsoft IE7 Development Team Blog.
The taskbar will work with both IE7 (I have played with the beta for a few weeks and have only praise for Microsoft efforts, save for a few memory/performance issues when many tabs are opened) and IE6. Some of our web developers use Firefox and have multiple developer toolbars installed, often with overlapping and unused features. Having played with the IE developer toolbar for a few hours, I'm impressed and of the view that it comes close to the best combinations on Firefox.
According to Microsoft, the toolbar provides several featured for exploring and understanding HTML and web pages:
- Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
- Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
- Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
- View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
- Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
- Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
- Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
- Immediately resize the browser window to 800x600 or a custom size.
- Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
- Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
- Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.
Most web developers I know develop in Firefox because in doing so, they believe their code is cleaner and more compatible. If Microsoft deliver on their promises with IE7, and then some, the IE7/developer toolbar combo might be enough to win a few web developer hearts back.
