Microsoft’s free Script Debugger

I needed to debug some JavaScript in IE yesterday and I found this:

Microsoft’s free Script Debugger

Unfortunately, in true Microsoft fashion, it kept locking up on me and hanging IE. 🙂

Eventually, I found the problem myself:

window.onload = onload;
function onload() { ... }

IE does not like it when you call a function “onload” (in the past, I’ve had similar problems trying to use a submit handler function called “submit”). Changed it to this:

window.onload = do_onload;
function do_onload() { ... }

and all was well.

How to load the JavaScript console in the sidebar

When developing DHTML pages and testing with Firefox, one of the things that I find inefficient is having to flip back and forth between the page and the JavaScript console. The following tip shows you how to load the JavaScript console in the sidebar by simply making a bookmark to the chrome URL and then checking the load in sidebar option:

Andy Jarrett | How to load the JavaScript console in the sidebar

Want to learn about more hacks like this? Check out the new O’Reilly “Firefox Hacks” book:

Remote XUL is a pain

I’m struggling to get a remote XUL app working that uses a dont-build-content tree XUL template with a remote RDF datasource. The problem is that Mozilla’s security model is just too restrictive in terms of what remote XUL and JavaScript can do. An extension could do this no problem, but I can only get the remote XUL to do what I want if I change the browser’s security settings (which I can’t ask users to do) or use signed JavaScript (which sounds like a royal pain in the butt). More info at these forum threads:

Yahoo! Search Sidebar for Firefox

This Firefox extension adds a “Yahoo! Search” item in Firefox’s View | Sidebar
menu (Alt+Y is the shortcut key) that opens a sidebar tailored for Web searching with Yahoo! Search. It’s using JavaScript to access Yahoo’s Web Services API.

Yahoo! Search Sidebar screenshot

Check out my Yahoo! Search Sidebar for Firefox.

Direct download link on my sourceforge site

I’m working on getting this added to Mozilla Update. Here’s the "bug report"