Tag: firefox

Changing the window scope in Firebug

Posted on by

If I had to choose one piece of advice for new web developers, I’d tell them to learn to use Firebug. Firebug is probably the most valuable debugging tool available, but if you are just getting started, it may seem pretty opaque at first.

In addition, some things do not appear to work as advertised. In particular, the “cd” function does nothing as far as I can tell.

The page that documents the commands you can use within Firebug lists the cd command as a way of changing the window scope:

Picture 23.png

Continue reading

When colspan property doesn’t appear to work in Firefox or Safari

Posted on by

When building web applications I often use display styles to show or hide divs or table rows as needed. On one project, I found that the “colspan” property did not seem to work in Firefox or Safari. This was because I had incorrectly used display:block to style the TR element, instead of display:table-row. A demo is below, and the code follows.

Continue reading

Debugging and troubleshooting HTML and javascript

Posted on by

Spreadfirefox Affiliate Button

Firefox, the web developer’s debugging tool of choice

The best browser to use to check javascript errors is Firefox, hands down. Other browsers have some error reporting, but none give you anywhere near the detailed information as Firebug, an addon to Firefox. The extensions available allow you to snoop into every aspect of your page, and into the communication between page and server.

You will need to get several Firefox extensions:

Firebug
Firebug is the one extension I can’t live without. It shows errors in javascript, css, allows you to inspect the HTML source, computed style, events, etc.

Continue reading