Lately I have been having trouble with debugging using Chrome dev tools. Once I open dev tools and start using the javascript debugger or the HTML inspector, every action will take at least a few seconds. Another developer with the exact same machine does not experience similar problems. I have tried reinstalling chrome and installing Chrome Canary, but the problem still remains the same. It did not use to be like this, and it is driving me mad, so that is why I am reaching out to the stack overflow community. Does anyone know any common reasons why dev tools would be performing so badly on a decent computer? Are there any settings I can try disabling, etc?
I am running Windows 10, and the client-side technology stack I am working with is based on React and Webpack with hot reload.
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I just installed Firefox on a new computer running Windows 8.1.
I usually use Chrome but recently I've been redesigning my website and today I tried loading it on multiple browsers to see if there were any problems.
It's a Flash games site with lots of flash ads. So when I went to my site in the new Firefox browser, I was surprised to see a lot of "plugin needed" boxes.
I tried loads of sites, and it became apparent that flash was not installed in the firefox browser at all. No Flash was loading.
Bizarrely, the grey box telling me I needed a plugin didn't give me any hint as to what plugin I needed, provided no link, and even blocked the fail-safe link to adobe that is displayed if flashplayer is not installed when using swfobject.js.
I tried searching for the flash player update in the firefox add-ons - nothing.
I tried searching on google and downloaded the general flash player update (http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/) - installed it and nothing changed.
Eventually after 20 minutes of searching, I found this obscure page on Adobe:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html
I downloaded and ran the exe for 'Plugin-based browsers' and this worked.
It appears the latest version of Firefox has deliberately not included Flash Player, which is utterly mad if that's really true.
However, I can't find any discussion or documentation that this is the case. But then why wasn't it included in my version?
Does anybody know anything about this?
Firefox has never included Flash, you always need to go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer and download the Flash Plugin on your first install of Firefox. Make sure that you turn on autoupdate for Flash by using the Flash cpanel app in your Windows Control Panel. Then check regularly to make sure Flash is still autoupdating. It can have a bad habit of failing.
It's only recently that Microsoft includes Flash and only on IE on Windows 8+ as a copy of Google's attempt to increase Flash security by including it in Chrome some time back. IE gets its Flash updates through Windows Update when Microsoft gets the patches applied.
Google is the 800lb gorilla that gets what it wants and twisted Adobe's arm to force them to supply Flash code so they can do their own updates via their Pepper Flash module which updates when Chrome autoupdates.
While Mozilla will warn you that Flash is out of date, they do not have the monetary clout like huge corporations (Microsoft, Google) to force Adobe to give them source code so they can fix Adobe's security sieve as it happens.
Mozilla has chosen to promote HTML5 and open DRM to hurry the eventual demise of a piece of Macromedia Legacy web extensions that has been plaguing us with serious zero day exploits (Jan-Feb 2015 most recent) that often appear back-to-back and often get 2 try patch releases in the hope that it gets fixed.
And in that same timeframe, often Chrome and Windows 8 versions of IE have a similar lag to bug fix, though a lot quicker than Adobe.
Get in the habit manually checking Chrome's version, Chrome can suffer update failure despite its automatic update feature.
How can I use IE8 Developer Tools to inspect network traffic?
Specifics:
I need to test if files have loaded or if they have loaded slow. In Firefox/Firebug I can do this by using the NET tab.
Restrictions:
I cannot install additional software, so answers in Examine http response headers in IE8 are of no use to me. :( I am debugging issues on restricted computer systems and do not have admin rights.
Rumors?
I have read that there is no way, at all, to inspect network traffic using IE8 Developer Tools, is this true?
Thanks.
In http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/22/ie9-developer-tools-network-tab.aspx it says:
The developer tools include some new capabilities and improvements
over the tools in IE8:
A new tab for inspecting network traffic.
So this is impossible in IE8 (without installing additional software, that is).
That's that.
I'm at my wits end right now trying to get a website working in IE7-9, the issue I'm having is getting text-shadow to appear in a decent matter. I've been using the 960 grid system so changes are very minimum, I've been checking changes with IE Netrender. However lately IE Netrender has been having issues so I can't test the layout in a timely fashion.
I did have VM Ware set up but I'm really tired of reactivating my Windows copy and installing a separate image for each version of the browser. I don't have Windows 7 for IE9 as well. I'm looking for a free option. I've tried searching but everything seems outdated.
So my question is, how does everyone test their site for IE7-9?
The IE Developer Tools let you set IE7 and IE8 modes on IE9, so you can get 98% testing with one version.
There are some issues that don't crop up there though, so its a good idea to do a quick real browser check at the end.
MS has free VMs you can download with the different versions of IE on them. I'm not sure if you can run them on a Mac though.
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575
By having a Windows license. Perhaps not the answer you're looking for, but there's no such thing as a free meal. The only truly guaranteed method of testing a site in Internet Explorer is to actually use it in Internet Explorer, be it in a virtual machine or on a real PC. Spoon used to have an Internet Explorer virtualization web app, but that has since been removed at Microsoft's behest.
I develop web applications on a Mac, so I can test the standard Mac browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc). But I'm wondering what is the accepted way for testing Windows browsers and especially IE? How does one test different versions of IE?
Some possible solutions I can think of:
Dual boot - This seems like a pain if you are developing code in a Mac environment, but want to test in Windows.
Windows virtual machine - This has always sent my laptop fan haywire and caused general slowness
Buy a Windows laptop - This certainly works, but is a cost I'm not in the mood to pay for just a test machine.
Something else I'm missing?
I'm not looking for an absolute right or wrong answer here, I'm just curious what other developers do, and if there's any accepted practice.
Another option, if you can run Virtual PC or have a virtualization application that can use VPC virtual hard drives, is to download the IE Application Compatibility vhds from Microsoft.
Adobe BrowserLab
Easiest way is virtual machines that contain their separate versions of IE since you can not easily have multiple versions of IE running with the update to IE8.
If you want to do automated stuff, you always can use Selenium Web Driver
virtual box looks like a good option... except you need to get a hold of a windows os.
apparently there is also something called winebottler... check out this other post from stack overflow for more details.
Is there a IE tester for mac?
IE tester is a not a bad option, allowing you to switch between different versions of IE at the click-of-a-mouse. It's not perfect, there are a few things it wont mimic exactly, but if you're on a budget it's great (and free). But of course you will need access to a windows box. Beg/borrow/steal one? To be honest, if you're doing a lot of web dev, you should have access to a machine for testing.
The alternative is to use an online rendering service, but that will cost you.
The reason I ask is mostly due to how Google Chrome installation works once you click the "Accept and install" button from Firefox. After you click the installation is started directly and when it's completed Chrome itself starts up.
Firefox does not show any "Save" or "Confirm" dialogs after you click the Install button (on Chrome install web page).
Now, is this standard behaviour? Or might it be due to having an old version of Chrome already on the computer (Note: The new version was still installed from Firefox).
Seems a bit risky to me, all you have to do is fool the user to click something and then you can do whatever you want on his machine, or? Personally I thought things like this only worked with IE/ActiveX.
Looking at the code of the chrome download page, they seem to be using three mechanisms:
Standard download
OneClick (using the google updater plugin)
ClickOnce (using the .NET Framework assistant plugin)
ClickOnce is widely available due to the pervasiveness of .NET 3.5 SP 1 (in which it is bundled).
This is absolutely not standard behaviour. It looks like it is some kind of extension in Firefox. This will not work in Opera, IE or Safari. For those they might use different methods. For IE maybe ActiveX. The rest just downloads a small setup file.
Microsoft has a propritary solution which is always included in their development programs, called ClickOnce. It needs .NET Framework. .NET Framework installs a Firefox extension for ClickOnce, and for everything else you can just run the setup.exe.
Google's updater is standard and open source, (called Omaha) but there are no open source server implementations as yet. It can be found here.
The way I understand it working is that when you download a file you trigger the updater with an ID and it takes care of the installation and maintenance of the program.
(speculative) I suspect the old installation or rather its updater took over at that point. As for the risk: If the Chrome guys did their homework (and I suspect they have), then Chrome will check for signatures on the file, etc. before running anything. That's standard behavior for updaters (sane ones, at least) and prevents abuse at that point.