I first wrote this up as a post on the ASP.NET Client Side Web Development Forum when I realized that my blog is badly neglected and I ought to be writing stuff there. You can find my forum post here to see if anybody responded over there.

Yesterday I was reading the Visual Web Developer Blog. They have a really good article on JavaScript Intellisence in Visual Studio. http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/11/18/jscript-intellisense-faq.aspx

In the article and comments the author was really encouraging users to post their issues with the technology because they really did use it to improve the products.

That request got me to thinking about the different little issues that I run into as a developer and I was reminded of something that I deal with countless times every day. I started writing it up as a comment in that blog post but I stopped because it was a little off topic and I didn't want to pollute the blog comments with off topic stuff.

So I decided to write up my little rant here .

I don't know how many other people this affects but the following issue affects me every day. In order to be able to debug JavaScript in web pages, I leave my browser in "debug" mode all the time because it is a pain to switch it on and off. This allows me to quickly jump into some JavaScript if I find a problem. However, the consequence is that now every page I browse to with IE pops up that little dialog asking me if I want to debug a script error on the page. It is amazing to me how many pages have so many script errors (at least in IE). I also think this causes a lot of my IE crashes especially when I get 2 or more dialogs in deadlock with each other on different tabs. Does anyone else get this?

Every time I go to cnn.com I know before I even type in the address that I'm going to get at least 2 Debug popups.

Something that compounds the problem for me is that I'm a "Right Click -> Open in New Tab" browser. As I read, if I encounter a link that I'm interested in I open it in a new tab and keep reading. After I finish the page I'm on, I go to the next tab and start reading. But this causes conflicts and lockups when multiple tabs popup Modal Debug Dialogs and I think that leads to a lot of the crashes that I get.

But it is annoying even if you don't browse that way. This problem is at its worst if you even encounter a page that causes a LOT of JavaScript errors or if you browse to a page that triggers an error when your mouse hovers over an element that you have to cross in order to get your mouse out of the browser window so you can close it. Every time you try to get the mouse out you trigger a modal dialog. After you close it, you try to get out again and re-trigger the modal dialog.

So how do other people deal with this? Is there a trick that I don't know that would make this more bearable?

How about the IE team? Could that change how this works so that it wouldn't cause so many problems and halts when I'm working? I would love to see a way to turn debugging on and off easier. I would also love to see the modal dialog removed and replaced with something else like a little error icon or something. The work on IE 8 has been awesome so far. the new debug and dev tools are pretty neat. How about making it easier for web developers to browse the web normally when not debugging?