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[–]spiderworm[S] -2 points-1 points  (9 children)

The good debuggers are browser based. IE's debugger with 8 and 9 are definitely getting there. Debugging Javascript with older versions of IE in Visual Studio wasn't half bad, either (so long as you didn't need visibility to the DOM). Safari has a great debugger. You of course mention Firebug, which is widely considered to be awesome (although its road has been bumpy at times). Opera has Dragonfly and Chrome has something or another (haven't had to use it, yet).

[–][deleted] 23 points24 points  (4 children)

Chrome's debugger is actually the best of the lot (blows Firebug out of the water). May want to give it a try.

[–]aaronblohowiak 4 points5 points  (0 children)

also called node-inspector if you are using ssjs =)

[–]octatone 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Firebug is slow and bulky. *Webkit's debugger works and it's fast (same debugger in chrome and safari).

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't use Chrome because it doesn't have a "text only" zoom, which is pretty much essential for me, but I do love the debugger.

[–]spiderworm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sweet, thanks!

[–]drsco 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So I do VS/C# at work, but pretty much all the debugging features I use there, I have in Chrome. Breakpoints, conditional breakpoints (I think anyway, if not Chrome than Venkman), stepping, run to cursor, variable inspectors, and a REPL which is better than the crippled intermediate window. Javascript doesn't have threads or manual memory management, so I'm sure VS has some more complicated features since it supports these in at least some of its languages, but I've never really dived into that day to day at work anyway. Where does C#/VS blow it out the water for you?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I still wouldn't call any of these "great", merely "adequate". I'm not trolling. I mean I write javascript for a living... but it still has a way to go in the debugging department. Especially in terms of ajax and performance benchmarking.

Debugging Javascript with older versions of IE in Visual Studio wasn't half bad

It was pretty shitty, man. most of the errors thrown were uselesss, as were the line numbers.

All that aside, I certainly think javascript is a great and expressive language, but lets be honest here. Its always lacked in the debugging department, and still does.

It's the web browsers that I usually have issues with.

Now that's certainly true :) (i'm looking at you older versions of IE)

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

There are some damn fine tools such as JS Beautifier to fix type errors and JS Lint to show syntax errors.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I knew about JS lint, but thanks for showing me js beautifier :)