Web Development

IE Developer Toolbar: Everything You Need to Know!

By Mary, on February 9, 2021, updated on November 27, 2022 - 4 min read

Bid farewell to Microsoft Explorer’s View Source element, well nearly. For those of us who do a ton of web development, there has consistently been a requirement for a tool to look at the structure of documents we’re working on, presenting Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.

Internet Explorer didn’t have a developer-friendly browser in its past version, yet huge enhancements can be found in its most recent version. The implicit developer tools in Internet Explorer now make development and debugging of code in the browser a basic task. Internet Explorer Developer Tools currently include highlights like other developer-centered browsers, for example, Firefox and Chrome.

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar allows web developers to look at and change the website’s CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript. Firefox internet browser has had a brilliant add-on, named Firebug that gave this sort of use for some time now.

This article will assist you with understanding Developer Tools in more detail and effectively.

A Sneak Peak into the Internet Explorer Developer Tools

We hate debugging and have never met any developer who contended something else. It’s a drag to need to go through your code and debug why it’s messed up. What’s more, above all, it’s a confirmation that the code is broken and that you’re not trustworthy.

Genuinely, bugs are just a characteristic piece of the web development process, and, while we may hate them, we positively need to manage them. Front-end developers haven’t generally had rich debugging tools like different platforms and languages. In the past times, alert() was your go-to function and a significant technique for debuggers to debug the code.

Also, debugging client-side code has its remarkable arrangement of difficulties due to the variety of innovations that are in play in recent times. Looking at the situation objectively, debugging pages, particularly dynamic ones includes so many moving parts that could influence the rendering process.

internet explorer development bar
From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/legacy/hh968260(v=vs.85)

You have the Document Object Model (DOM), JavaScript, CSS, network traffic, HTTP headers, and a lot more technologies that all work to create a page and collaborate and influence one another.

How to Enable & Access ‘Inspect Element’ in Internet Explorer

The Inspect Element tool assists with enabling different operations on the URL of a website. Such tasks include website analysis, making changes, and allowing trial browser tools to work among different other tasks. This implies that you’ll have the option to view and alter the HTML and CSS of a website page. Since Inspect Element is a high-level feature, it should be utilized with great attention.

There are a few different ways to enable and use Inspect Element depending upon the browser version you have.

One approach to access Inspect Element is to press F12 on your keyboard. The Document Object Model (DOM) Explorer is active by default, and you can click on the “Select Element” symbol in the upper left corner. This will lead you to the open page where you can choose the item you want to assess. Then again, you can right-click on an element, and from the pop-up menu, select “Inspect Element.”

Use Cases of IE Developer Tools

JavaScript Debugging

Debugging websites and web applications has been made simple by present-day browsers that also includes developer tools. IE helps in inspecting and debugging front-end code rapidly as well as in improving a website’s performance capabilities.

Developers focus a ton on using standard-based development procedures to ensure their websites work extraordinarily on IE.

Moreover, they invest an extraordinary time debugging code, particularly JavaScript. In this way, to follow down an odd bug, you simply need a JavaScript debugger that can allow you to analyze the code in a variety of ways.

Code Readability

One of the main highlights of IE Developer Tools is the capacity to prettify JavaScript code. We don’t have a clue about any developer who isn’t prettifying their production code these days.

Also, that is the correct way to go, at the same time, when you need to debug something on a production website – particularly where you don’t have access to source code – having the option to prettify the code is priceless. Indeed, there are online tools like JavaScript Beautify that can do that yet it would compel you to reorder code into it. Having this capacity built directly in saves a huge load of time.

Traversing Through The Code

When the code is readable, it makes it simpler to decide the flow of the source code. Now, you can set breakpoints at logical spots in the code to confine issues as you go through it.

What’s more, you can set various breakpoints across different source files. You can also determine contingent breakpoints allowing you to break the code stream dependent on a particular value.

Besides, it assists with separating unexpected code paths that might be a difficult point. Data is critical to understanding what’s going on and the developer tools work to give you the choices to characterize what you need to see.

What about Debugbar ?

Debugbar is an historic Internet Explorer developer toolbar, divided in a toolbar and a sidebar.

It allows to help you debugging your website faster or to analyse quickly any web page.

This development bar was created at a time there was no tool available in Internet Explorer to debug easily the code of your web page. At this time, tootls like Firebug for Firefox were the only tools available.

But in the 2000’s years, Internet Explorer had the Chrome browser hegemony we see today. Debugbar was the perfect tool which helped thousands of developers to debug their websites.

Conclusion

As we have discussed in this article, IE has made a huge improvement in its eleventh, developer-friendly browser version. It currently has tools that help in improving performance, much the same as browsers, for example, Chrome and Firefox. The IE Developer Tools likewise assist you with quick and smooth web experiences, as it will allow you to debug and fix performance-related issues in a website or application.

The essential motivation to write this piece is to make the developers aware of IE Developer Tools who had confusion about it or didn’t even realize that they even existed. We trust that it assists developers in discovering what’s accessible and makes their debugging somewhat simpler.

We likewise hope that it creates feedback for future highlights that developers need. While the current usability is acceptable, there are various new things that you, the developers, would consider fundamental to your debugging and coding experience.

Mary