Top 6 Internet Explorer Extensions for Web Develop

For Web developers wanting to use Micosoft’s Internet Explorer as their primary browser, there’s some terrific IE extensions/add-ons that can aid you analyze, troubleshoot, debug, and speed up development of web pages.

Here, you’ll find the top 6 free IE extensions for web developers.

Where appropriate (and available), you’ll also find related resources, their download page, and documentation.

1. Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

The , developed by Microsoft, offers several features and options to aid web development and design.

It shares many features that we love from Chris Pederick’s Firefox Web Developer extension such as: outline div elements, mark-up validation tools, ruler and measuring tools, resizing the browser window precisely (i.e. to 800×600), and all that good stuff.

It’s an essential tool for analyzing and troubleshooting web pages.

Some features:

• A Document Object Model inspector pane
• Multiple validation - automatically opens validation services in multiple browser tabs at the same time
• Syntax coloring of source code

Related Resources:

• "Using Microsoft IE Developer Toolbar" by Arkady Lesniara
• "" by John Peterson

Download:

2. Web Accessibility Toolbar

The , developed by , was designed specifically to assess and analyze the accessibility of a web page, but it’s very useful regardless of whether you’re testing for accessibility or not.

Some features:

• Greyscale function - renders pages into grayscale so that you can test color contrast.
• Color Contrast Analyzer - a more detailed test for color blindness accessibility, which provides an analysis of the foreground and background color for "color visibility" as .
• Test Styles - which opens up a dialog box where you can edit existing CSS styles on a web page.

Related resources:

• "" on webcredible: user research & design
• "" on WebAim: Web Accessibility in Mind

Download:

Documentation:

• Toolbar Functions

3. HttpWatch (Basic Edition)

is an HTTP data viewer and debugger extension by . HttpWatch comes in two editions: Basic and Professional.

The Basic edition displays plenty of information regarding HTTP data and web page performance such as status codes, total elapsed time it takes a web page to load, amount of downloaded data, and HTTP compression savings (if you use data compression).

Some features:

• Page Level Time Chart - gives you a visual representation of the web page’s performance
• Errors Log Summary - notifies you of any HTTP errors encountered.

Download:

Documentation:

4. WebCollect

is a simple web content capture tool. It allows you to take and save screenshots easily (great tool for design mock-ups and presentation). It also has an eyedropper tool which allows you to sample colors from a web page to extract their color values (in RGB, Dec, and Hex).

Some features:

• Copy full screen - enabling you to copy a web page without having to crop or resize the image
• Capture Rectangle Area - which allows you to copy just parts of a web page.
• Support for most digital image file types such as JPG, PNG, and GIF.

Download:

5. Fiddler2

is a web debugging proxy add-on whichs logs HTTP(S) traffic data. It’s very robust in features and is customizable to your needs.

Some features:

• Session Inspector - which also provides you with headers and web forms data.
• Set break-points - so that you can experiment with inbound/outbound data.
• Performance Statistics - including world-wide estimated download times

Related resources:

• "" on MSDN.
• - allows you to edit script rules on fiddler.

Downloads:

• (required)

6. Web Development Helper

The is an IE extension targeted towards ASP.NET and JavaScript/Ajax Developers. It has a special set of tools for ASP.NET development.

Some features:

• Trap script errors - to see call stack errors.
• Detailed request headers

Downloads:

• Web Dev Helper from CodePlex - this page also contains the PDF documentation file for the Web Developer Helper
• (required)

IE still can’t match the Firefox’s number of extensions for web developers but these extensions help even out the field a little bit.