IETester: my new best friend for handling my worst enemy
I found a great tool out in the depths of the interweb, and I thought that I'd do a quick-ish post on it so that I can share the happiness with other people. The tool is called IETester, and it is brilliant. It seems to be a mdi container that is hooked into the api's of IE5.5, 6, 7, and 8 beta 1. This allows you to crack open a tab using each rendering engine and view your websites the way they would look in that browser.
This (above) is a screen shot of the program with the about pop up showing as well as several tabs open (all at nordictrack.com)
NordicTrack in IE 5.5 (above)
NordicTrack in IE 6 (above)
NordicTrack in IE7 (above)
NordicTrack in IE8 (above)
As you can see from the pictures, each release of IE handled the css styling and the page layout a little bit differently. It's almost fun to watch IE change from its quirky youth to an almost standards compliant browser (yes almost is a stretch isn't it).
BUGS:
Yeah you knew there'd be some, here's what I found, and what is posted on the developer's website.
- I almost went into epileptic shock while using it. Lots of screen flickering.
- It crashed on me the first time I opened it, not sure why.
- If you resize the screen, content may disapear.
- Flash may not work in the IE6 rendering engine (note: it did work for me at freemotion).
- Previous/Next buttons may not work.
- Focus doesn't work properly.
- Java applets esplode.
- Javascript loading may have problems... (may be the hidden cause of the screen flickering)
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Weekly Training – Debugging
It's time to learn how to get the bugs out. This week we covered basic debugging (from starting the server) to using some external tools (such as the fantastic Firebug plug-in). For the full show you can check the audio clip at the end (I'll post it when I'm done 'cleaning' it).
Highlights:
- Rational debugging mode
- Firebug (for both CSS editing and javascript debugging)
- Drew's fantastic commentary as nothing works the way he intends (for the first 20-ish minutes)
- My extremely long pause... that I think I may still be on.
On a side note, there are two other tools that are very helpful when trying to debug or develop on IE, Safari, Linux browsers, etc. They are XRAY and Aardvark, and both are bookmarklets (meaning you bookmark the javascript itself and run it when you need it, similar to a bookmark).
XRAY can be found here http://www.westciv.com/xray/.
Aardvark can be found here http://karmatics.com/aardvark/bookmarklet.html.
Audio clip will be here when I'm done editing it... UPDATE: Or it won't, looks like my sansa destroyed the file, I mean it's still there, just not in a format that any program can read... I may still play with this, but I'm thinking it's a lost cause... sorry 
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