Microsoft have just released the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta, a plug-in that “provides several features for deeply exploring and understanding Web pages”.
While this is undoubtedly a good move, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s too little too late. Apart from the ‘design ruler’, the toolbar contains no features that haven’t already made an appearance in the equivalent Firefox toolbar extension.
Perhaps if the DOM exploration feature enabled you to inspect the dynamically constructed DOM tree it would be worth the installation effort… which, unfortunately, is an effort; as the process requires the user to reboot the machine (which is a minor gripe I know but a gripe nonetheless. Note to self: I thought that the browser was no longer part of the O/S, so why the need for a reboot?).
I also can’t help thinking that this isn’t where Microsoft should be placing their development muscle. Personally, I would have preferred if the development time had of been spent on something more tangible – like an upgrade to the ever-odious “JavaScript error console” currently shipped with Internet Explorer.
Quick update #1 (22/09/05):
Unfortunately the DOM exploration feature seems only to register DOM nodes that have been dynamically created as a result of the window.onload event. Any nodes created after this point do not display within the viewer at all.
This can be easily tested using the Little Yellow Sticky experiment; just create a few stickies, reload the page and then create a few more. The stickies created after the page reload do not appear within the DOM viewer, which is a shame, as it automatically renders the viewer inutile in these heady days of AJAX and web 2.0 development.
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