klenwell press

IE6 is one of the banes of my existence. We still have a user-base for it at the office. A small one, but I, my team, my boss, and some his bosses are still part of it. And since I have to code for IE6 at work, I keep IE6 installed at home. (The fact that Windows only allows one version of IE at a time doesn’t help any, though I am familiar with MultipleIEs.) And this makes fast web development for multiple platforms a nightmare.

There are two problems I have with javascript in IE6. One, it is strict. More strict than Firefox for certain things that don’t seem like they should make a lot of difference to me. That’s fine. I don’t fault it for following the rules. This is where the other problem comes up. It doesn’t do a great job telling you when you’ve broken the rules.

I stumbled across Firebug Lite a few months ago when I was trying to come up with a workaround for IE6′s lack of a console object. Recently, my manager (who’s a good programmer and no PHB) discovered it and mentioned it, so I started kicking it around a bit more. I realized there was one thing for which it could really be helpful: debugging.

Now I know there are javascript debuggers for IE6. This post how explains how to get it working with Microsoft Office. If you don’t have Office, Microsoft used to offer a free download: scd10en.exe. I don’t think you can find it on Microsoft’s site anymore, but google it and you’ll probably be able to find an old copy laying around somewhere.

But even this debugger is clunky (it pops open new windows), flaky (for some errors, it will consistently freeze up on me), and just painful when compared to something like Firebug in Firefox.

So I created a simple test script to test whether Firebug Lite could solve this problem. (Find the script here.) Alas, it looks like the debugger is one of the heavier parts of Firebug that the Lite version left out:

screenshot

So I soldier on with IE6 and it’s crappy scd10en debugging tool.