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I cannot get the internet explorer web developer tool bar to work with a pop-up, it won't render at the bottom of the pop-up. Any suggestions?

Leniel Maccaferri
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Brian
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6 Answers6

7

There's a very specific way to do this:

  1. open the developer tools (via F12 or whatever) in the main browser window. Ensure the developer tools are 'pinned' to this window.
  2. Do whatever you do to open the popup window
  3. Open the developer tools (via F12 or whatever) for the popup window
  4. unpin the developer tools window (CTRL+P) from the popup window
  5. close the popup window (this will automatically close the developer tools window too)
  6. keeping the developer tools open in the main browser window, open the popup window again. The developer tools window should open automatically alongside it.

You should now also be able to control whether the developer tools open for the popup window or not by toggling the developer tools in the main window. That;s how it works for me, anyway! This is all on IE9 on Windows 7 by the way...

The only problem with all of this is if you need to debug something that only happens the first time you launch the popup window...

Which is exactly the problem I have - I've got a SCORM-compliant e-learning course that launches in a popup window and which has a bug that only happens on first launching the course in IE!! Oh well...

moloko
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I am pretty sure it won't work with modal popup windows. If you are opening popups as modal you may have to change the code to mode-less just for debugging purposes.

TheZenker
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    If you know the actual URL of your popup, you can just paste that URL into a regular tab and treat it like a regular window instead of a popup for debugging. – Lane Jun 06 '11 at 20:36
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    Only problem with that is that some things behave differently in Modal Dialogs, resize rendering is one of them. The resize event seems to sometimes fire before the new width of elements have been calculated by the browser. So debugging in Modeless dialog is not always good enough. – oldwizard Nov 16 '11 at 08:57
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Use IE8, which has a much improved set of developer tools as compared to the extremely limited set in IE7. Hit F12 to open the developer tools in the popup.

EricLaw
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I just tried this on my machine, and it seems to be working. Make sure you're using the latest version

Otherwise update your question and I'll try to help out again.

update: Make sure the toolbar is docked to your parent window before the popup fires. When I have the toolbar docked (using the little dock icon at the top right of the window) it seems to follow to the new popup.

Joe Basirico
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  • I re-installed to make sure I had the latest, no effect. – Brian Oct 22 '08 at 20:04
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    I just tried this, and the toolbar doesn't show up in the popup (non-modal) and doesn't seem to have any way to work with it. – chris May 20 '09 at 17:20
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I have a workaround for this that I shared on Twitter some days ago. It's useful when using IE 11 Developer Tools:

  • Right click inside the popup's window content
  • Select Inspect Element to attach the debugger.
  • Right click again and hit Refresh to see possible errors in the Console.

I still would like to be able to get the debugger attached upfront, that is, besides being able to debug the popup window after a refresh I wanted to be able to debug the 1st load event of the popup, that is, the 1st time it is open - but I have not found a way of achieving this.

Leniel Maccaferri
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Add a Javascript error in the code of the page, such as blabla();. It will make IE display the Javascript error dialog from which you can start the Developer Tools. You need to have Javascript error messages on I think:

Tools - Internet Options, the Advanced tab Make sure "Display a notification about every script error" is checked.

Not an ideal solution, but can help if you really need to debug in Modal Dialog mode when Modeless dialog does not produce the same result as in Modal Dialog.

oldwizard
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