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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."

7 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. 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

  2. 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.
  3. 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.

  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. 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
  7. 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