Posted on Tue 28 July 2009
All the following developer tools are free and publicly available. I use some on a daily basis and other less frequently, but they are all invaluable for saving a lot of time if you learn to use them in the correct scenario. Even if you haven't used them before, just remembering they exist may help you out in the future. Please feel free to suggest any more that I may have missed.
Firebug is by far and away the best tool for debugging websites. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page as well as view and examine all the network traffic (including AJAX postbacks) being loaded by the website. Firebug is such a good add-on, it has add-ons itself, inlcuding Firecookie for viewing and managing cookies and YSlow for grading and improving website performance and load times. Learn to use Firebug and I gurantee it will save you a lot of time.
A lot of features that are really useful in conjuction with Firebug. Key features include managing cache, CSS, Javascript, images, resizing, standards validation and many more.
Blackbird is an open source JavaScript message log and console that is invaluable if you are spending a lot of time coding with javascript and avoids having to use the alert() function.
Fiddler is a free web debugging proxy for any HTTP(S) traffic (from browsers, applications etc), that is much more powerful than the 'Net' tab in Firebug. A key feature is the auto-responder, which allows you to create rules for specific cases to auto respond with a custom response.
Developer Tools in IE/Safari
Internet Explorer and Safari both have developer tools built in, which have useful features such as DOM inspection.
2 tools for testing web sites in older version of Internet Explorer (so useful for checking IE6 layouts). Be careful though, Multiple IE is no longer supported and I have known them to differ quite a lot with some layouts.
Flash Tracer is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to see the output of any running flash movies (including AIR). This is great for debugging once you have finished testing from within the flash IDE.
Simply type in a web address and WAVE will tell you if there are any glaring accessibility errors. Be careful though - this doesnt mean your webssite is necessarily actually accessible.
Enter a URL or markup to check that it is valid (X)HTML. There are also other validators for Atom and RSS feeds and CSS
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