Microsoft announced Internet Explorer Diagnostics Adapter for developers. This tool will enable them to debug and diagnose Internet Explorer 11 using the Chrome remote debug protocol.
IE Diagnostics Adapter
As Microsoft puts, this tool stands as an open source experimental adapter for Internet Explorer that is developed to allow developers use to use diverse tooling ecosystem across browsers such as Chrome. The tool would also be updated in future to work with Microsoft’s Project Spartan.
IE trying to be Developer friendly
Chrome has been pretty famous among developers, thanks to features such as mobile emulation, websocket debugging, superior sourcemap support and many more. Firefox has been closely following Chrome and has superior features such as font inspector, JSON formatter, and 3D view for z-index debugging.
Internet Explorer has been a missing name in the developer’s list, however with the new Diagnostics Adapter Microsoft is looking to win the confidence back.
Andy Sterland, Program Manager, Client Platform Tools, mentioned,
“Internet Explorer already supports WebDriver, which gives test frameworks a standard mechanism to automate the browser, reducing the cost to developers to add a new browser to their test matrix. In the same spirit, we want to enable third party tools to target IE like any other browser. The IE Diagnostics Adapter makes this possible by providing a bridge that allows IE to speak the Chrome remote debugging protocol. This protocol allows 3rd party tools to debug, diagnose, and profile Chrome”.
The Diagnostic adapter currently supports only a limited subset of the API surface. As a developer, you can attach the Chrome Dev Tools and get basic script debugging by running IE, starting the proxy, and browsing to http://localhost:9222/ from Chrome. Refer image below,
The IE Diagnostics Adapter is still under development and users can see its progress on GitHub. The tool is open sourced under the MIT license. By launching IE Diagnostics Adapter Microsoft is looking to make developing web sites for IE and Project Spartan as easy as possible and inviting developers to build tools that can be based on IE and Project Spartan.
