Comments on: Six Things Your Mom Never Told You About Debugging Javascript

By: matas

matas — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:32:16 +0000

well I know your pain, but it’s possible to be better prepared for this kind of problems.
two essential tools for Internet Explorer testing are:
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/CompanionJS/HomePage
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

companion.js console saved me a lot of time!

By: Christian

Christian — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:19:54 +0000

Nice info. heading into a class on Java now.

By: h3

h3 — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:35:24 +0000

Eheh this coma madness gave me my share of headaches in my beginings..

Forgetting a trailing semicolon in a minified JavaScript script can also be painful to debug.

But to me the ultimate worst IE abomination is the document.all in the window object.

This kind of problem is extremely hard to trace back and of course you can’t count on IE to give you any useful information whatsoever. So..

document.all.varName === window.varName;

Therefore IE6 Can’t distinguish JavaScript variable names from DOM element IDs and they can overwrite each others. This leads to nearly un-tracable bugs and meaningless errors message.

By: kureikain

kureikain — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:35:08 +0000

For 5),
IE reports the last errors, but it has Previous& Next buttons, we can use those buttons to navigate to errors!

By: tbela99

tbela99 — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:54:50 +0000

sometimes, I use netbeans to track nasty errors like trailing comma in my js code.

By: thomasd

thomasd — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:07:30 +0000

JSLint helped me a lot to prevent such situations, it’s one of the most useful javascript develop tools i know.

Aptana+JSLint+Firebug totally rocks!

By: Ryan Rampersad

Ryan Rampersad — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:30:32 +0000

Maybe this goes too far.

$(“head”).fireEvent();

By: Langel

Langel — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:57:04 +0000

lool

By: Todd

Todd — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:31:53 +0000

Same is true with aptana if your turn on the jslint support.

By: SeanJA

SeanJA — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:15:16 +0000

Fortunately, if you are using Netbeans it marks a trailing comma as an error, it will also warn you about things that won’t work in every browser.