Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Using Mozilla in Testing and Debugging

Posted by michael on from the everything-looks-like-a-nail dept.

Henrik Gemal writes "In this article I will describe some very cool features in Mozilla which will enable you to quickly find and debug errors in your web site and web applications."

18 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. ok, so.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    in this new roadmap the mozilla tema put out, where does this stuff fit in? Features like this are decidedly pimpin and mozilla has tons of cool features that I'm always uncovering. But the new roadmap said to focus on phoenix and minotaur. Phoenix is lean and mean and minotaur is email, where does this stuff go? I don't want to lose stuff like this.

  2. Impressive features list by dtolton · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have been using Mozilla because I love the tabbed browser windows. I was completely unaware of all the extra features it offers.

    The DOM Inspector will be really nice for checking out the rendered structure of a page. I've always had a tough time with this since I generate most of my pages dynamically. In fact most of those tools will be *incredibly* useful in that context.

    I have to say I'm really impressed with the progress the Mozilla team is making. For a while there IE was leading the way, now that trend has clearly reversed.

    --

    Doug Tolton

    "The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
  3. Big Advantage by Dave+W · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is a really significant advantage to Mozilla.

    With Mozilla being so attractive to web developers it makes it so much more likely that sites will fully support mozilla and those developers will bring in more users.

    Getting developers to use your application is a great way to build market share.

    Our own developers tend to use Mozilla as the key browser already, with tests to check behaviour on IE later.

    All we need now is full etester type functionality using Mozilla instead of IE (preferably Linux based). We have used many add-ons for JUnit (like Canoo Webtest), but the javascript and DOM support is always the problem. Embedding mozilla might be a better way to go.

    Dave

  4. Mozilla is great for debugging Javascript... by X_Caffeine · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Many javascript programmers consider Mozilla to have a buggier javascript implementation than MSIE; what they don't get is that MSIE is very good at interpreting buggy code, which leads to... well, bugs and incompatibility. Mozilla forces you to do it the right way, which leads to greater compatibility in the grand scheme of things.


    I wish this article had addressed the whole MSIE "document.body" mess, though. The correct DOM equivalent is "document.documentelement", but it doesn't work in MSIE6 unless the document is properly defined with a DOCTYPE declaration (otherwise MSIE is in backward-compatibility/buggy mode).


    Otherwise, a really great introduction. I've been using Mozilla to do javascript for months and didn't know most of the data here.

    --
    // I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
  5. a few criticisms by mlheur · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My biggest criticism is regarding the source viewer. Yes in IE the default source viewer is Notepad, but that can be changed - there's no mention of that ability in the article.

    The other problem with the source viewer is that Mozilla goes to the server to grab the source, not using the exact source displayed on the screen if you're using dynamic server side variables (PHP), whereas IE gives you the source of whatever's in memory and displayed on the screen.

    Other than that I prefer Mozilla too.

  6. Feature requests by robbo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I agree that HTML highlighting is great, but I've been meaning to post a feature request on bugzilla for some time: let me view-source in a tab, rather than open a new window. That should be really easy to do. I'd also love to have keyboard navigation between tabs (ok, it's probably there already, or at least in Phoenix, but I haven't found them yet..)

    --
    So long, and thanks for all the Phish
  7. Variable timeout? by alispguru · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What I could really use is a browser that let you set the timeout (when waiting for an HTTP transaction to come back) to something large, or better yet to turn it off completely.

    I write web applications in Common Lisp, so when developing I have the Lisp top-level open and running. Errors on the server side pop up a Lisp debugger on the thread doing the transaction, I can poke around in the stack, figure out the problem, even fix it and continue - but only if I do it quickly, before the browser decides it's waited on me long enough and closes the connection, which causes a broken-pipe error on the server side and can clobber my debugger session.

    So, anybody know how to make any decent browser never time out? Mac OS X browser preferred, but I'll take Linux or Windows in a pinch.

    --

    To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
  8. Re:Testing with mozilla by mwhahaha · · Score: 2, Interesting

    True, but I'm developing for a company who does e-commerce store hosting. And the site has to be compatible for just about everyone. We always get complaints about IE 5.0 and Mac's IE because of their FUBAR javascript implementations. I am the only one in the entire company who uses mozilla. So they are always coming up with javascript stuff I never see because my browser actually works :]

  9. Also, CSS debugging help by robbo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    CSS validation would be cool (of course there's always w3.org)

    I'd love to see something that helped me with CSS layout- a way to put big bright borders around divs and highlight their containing blocks, etc. I *don't* want that in composer, mind you, because I prefer to play with the raw source in an editor and reload the page to see how it looks.

    --
    So long, and thanks for all the Phish
  10. Re:paradime change by Blaine+Hilton · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have noticed this too. Another big factor I believe is changes in the shareware industry where a lot of developers are deciding instead of mailing CDs out or providing downloads, they could just offer the same thing on the web. Being web based give the author more control and more flexibility over the software then if it was a "standard" application.

  11. No wonder mozilla is so bloated. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If youre going to test websites, use a proper ide. Such as dreamweaver or quanta, even vim/emacs are more suitble for the job. Then you call your external browser (or embed its rendering engine in the ide) to test it.

    Mozilla dosen't even support editing in "view source". Other browsers let you call your own external editor, but not mozilla!

    The truth hurts

  12. One more feature request: IE emulation by robbo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't laugh, I'm serious. It would be nice to see that how page I'm working on renders in IE without switching OS and browsers. Most of the layout bugs and standards-defiance in IE are well documented and it shouldn't be too hard for Moz to behave like IE if the user so desired.

    I know, I know, I should post these requests on bugzilla..

    --
    So long, and thanks for all the Phish
    1. Re:One more feature request: IE emulation by robbo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, if you put enough monkeys at enough typewriters.. ;-)

      I haven't looked at the rendering engine code since the early gecko days, but you can bet that there are a lot of quirks in there to get pages on major sites that were designed for IE to render as the designers intended. Gecko may be standards compliant, but for ages the Debug menu had a long list of major sites that were important to render correctly.

      While I agree with you that it's probably not as easy as I suggested, I do think that the moz developers have a good sense of the major IE non-compliances and how they can be reproduced.

      --
      So long, and thanks for all the Phish
    2. Re:One more feature request: IE emulation by mooman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      But given the fact that there are some significant differences between IE versions, which one would you emulate? All of them? Jeez.. talk about bloat, all for the purpose of emulating quirks!

      And we won't even get into IE differences between platforms either...

      Personally, one of the singularly biggest and best features of Mozilla is that it plays well with others. You can have multiple versions of it installed at a time on one box. Any webdev worth their salt will have a copy of every major browser that intend to support already installed on their box(en). It's been one of my biggest complaints about IE since the IE3 days. I can only have one IE version on a box, usually without even the means to uninstall it... Makes testing cross-platform a pain in the @ss...

      --
      In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
  13. Mozilla vs IE by Tolkien · · Score: 1, Interesting
    yaddi yaddi yadda

    Although IE is buggy as all hell, it's got a couple things that I wish Mozilla had, like when you middle click and can go up and down a 10k text file in 2 seconds flat, though I love Mozilla's tabs et al, I hope Mozilla developpers impliment the middle-click scrolling soon, most every windows app can do it except Mozilla!

    --
    how is babby formed?
  14. Opera feature (offtopic) by illsorted · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Opera provides a shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+V) that uploads the source of the active frame to the W3C validation page automagically and displays the validation results.

  15. More on Cookie Handling by Alan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The article notes that the cookie allow/deny dialoge is almost identical between the two browsers, but misses one huge plus for mozilla. The IE cookie confirm dialoge doesn't save it's state. I personally browse with the cookie set to "ask me" each time, and I look at the cookie that is being set, make sure my IP address or other personal-looking information is in there, and allow or deny.

    In mozilla the "more" dialoge starts up open if it was open last time, but the IE dialoge always starts closed, so I have to hit "more info" each and every time. Because of this mozilla is a big winner there for me, just from this one small detail.

    The nay sayers will say "no one does that", but I say that for the minority of us out there, it *does* help, and the majority will never see or be affected anyway...

  16. Still room for improvement. by AeiwiMaster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    1) If mozilla could do for HTML what it does for javascript.
    Have a live console which shows the HTML errors
    this would be very useful for web development.
    I do know about the online validators but
    normal development take place behind a firewall
    using dynamic server-side scripting,
    so every time your change the state of a page you
    would have to save it and upload it to the validator.
    a very slow process.

    2) In the cookie tool i need a function
    which remove the cookies from the current site.
    So you don't have to look trough a long list of cookies
    every time you test your cookie code.

    3) In view source i need a function which could auto format
    the HTML code.
    Many auto generate pages have there HTML in one long line.
    If Mozilla could auto format the code it would be useful.

    4) Finally I would like the spell checker to automatically
    to mark every misspelled word on the current web page.