Laurel Reitman, IE Program Mgr, on the Ajax Experience

Category: IE , Browsers , Conference

We were happy to have Laurel Reitman, the lead program manager on the IE team, out at the Ajax Experience. There was a lot of good dialog between her and Alex, Brendan, and others about the future of browsers in general and IE in specific. She has written a post on the IEBlog recapping her thoughts from the conference, and also pointing to some tools for folks struggling in IE.

One question on the top of everyone’s mind is how to debug and get more information about what’s going on with their AJAX-style applications. I wanted to point folks to some of the tools that are available today with Internet Explorer, many of which I mentioned at the conference.

She mentions the Web Development Helper that Nikhl Kothari developed, and of course the IE dev toolbar that is similiar to the Firefox toolbar. From Nikhl’s post on the Helper, it sounds like it requires an ASP.NET page on the server side?

Of course, the comments echo a common sentiment - give us a working javascript console for IE! Then we can worry about fancy extensions - but until we can actually see all the javascript errors thrown in IE, its still a massive pain tracking down IE-specific bugs when we only get “property not found at line 65″ and nothing else.