[thelist] error messages

[liorean]

Jeff Howden wrote:

> well, perhaps my opinion is clouded by the fact that i have microsoft script
> debugger installed.

Does that make any difference (I don't think so - Op7 and Moz stil are 
far more helpful)? If you have the script debugger, you have two error 
handling interfaces, sometimes one pops up, sometimes the other - for 
the same kind of error, even.

>  without that alot of the error messages would be
> difficult to decipher.

The script debugger is helping in localising the error to a certain 
file, it points to the right line etc - but it's still far from as good 
at telling you what the error is as mozilla's console is. Not to speak 
of Venkman.

> however, with it, mozilla can't even begin to come
> close to what the script debugger can do for me.

Hmm, I've never tried to run the script debugger as a development 
interface, but from those I know that do, it's far from as advanced as 
Venkman. Just using it as bug-report tool (as I do) hardly makes up for 
the lack of verbosity on ie's part, both when it comes to error reports 
and your manual tracking possibilities.

Just try, for example, String(document). Ie gives [object], moz and op7 
give [object HTMLDocument]. In some cases such information can be the 
difference between solving a bug or getting a headache from banging your 
head on the wall.


My moz-biased view:
When it comes to development tools, moz comes with the best there is, 
JSConsole, Venkman, DOMInspector, strict warnings. There's more that 
doesn't come with it, such as checky, prefbar, and context menu 
extensions, but can be downloaded. Has really good built-in toos for 
popup blocking, etc. which allows you to have javascript on while just 
browsering (I stopped "just browsing" with ie because of the lack of 
such built-in tools).

Opera has a lot of useful testing tools as well, and a really good 
JSConsole, but lacks in developer tools.

Ie comes with neither, but you can download the debugger, which makes 
the browser a fairly good development platform. It's still easier to 
track down and kill bugs with moz, and use ie for the ie-specific 
cleanup you have to do because of MS's tendency to introduce proprietary 
features and then keep them instead of correcting to the standardised ones.
-- 
liorean <mailto:liorean at user.bip.net>

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