Browsers' developer tools evolution

It’s great to see that better tools for developer start to appear.

As in many other cases, the race started IE5.01 with support for script debugging in an external Script Debugger app. And now the race takes us to the new level with awesome tools built into browsers (like Firebug in Fx or Devtools in IE8) or even better external – let’s welcome dynaTrace Ajax!

dynaTrace Ajax supports IE6, IE7 and IE8, and will soon support Firefox. It’s basically the best tool out there for profiling and debugging javascript and CSS.

Here’s what John Resig, creator of JQuery library says about the tool:

I’m very impressed with dynaTrace AJAX Edition’s ability to get at the underlying “magic” that happens inside a browser: page rendering, DOM method execution, browser events, and page layout calculation.

Much of this information is completely hidden from developers and I’ve never seen it so easily collected into a single tool. Huge kudos to dynaTrace for revealing this information and especially so for making it happen in Internet Explorer.

And here’s Steve Souders, web perfomance guru, says:

When it comes to analyzing your JavaScript code to find what's causing performance issues, dynaTrace Ajax Edition has the information to pinpoint the high-level area all the way down to the actual line of code that needs to be improved. I recommend you give it a test run and add it to your performance tool kit.

Must-have for any web-developer, seriously.

It’s interesting to see that Google and Apple play a good catch-up – both Chromium 4 and Apple Safari teams invest significant resources in building devtools, Chromium 4 finally has its own CPU & heap profilers now on top of V8. So bearing in mind that Firefox profiling will be supported by dynaTrace Ajax, it’s only Opera that’s left behind the game at the moment.

Come on, Opera team!

P.S. and by the way, Opera, can we get inPrivate browsing mode please?

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