There are few front-end web developers I know who actually use the Eclipse editor for development. Whether it’s the complexity of the IDE or simply resistance to change I cannot say. Working with Eclipse on enterprise apps has some serious advantages when it comes to working in multidisciplinary teams. And wrenching on a UI is no exception.
Last month Steve Souders announced Jdrop, a JSON repository in the cloud. Using Jdrop and Souders’ Mobile Perf bookmarklet, developers can send mobile browser data to the cloud for more careful analysis on other devices.
Web applications concatenate CSS files to improve performance, which can result in large numbers of style rules in a single file. Enter the 4095 selector limitation for IE browsers. An IE bug whereby the browser will only apply style for the first 4095 selectors declared per file. Impacted browsers include IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9.
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The user agent string, a piece of data transmitted in the HTTP header during a web request, contains information valuable in determining browser type and often basic system information.
Example user agent string sent from a web browser during an HTTP request:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.89 Safari/532.5
The above example, for instance, provides information such as browser and browser version, user locale (language), OS, system architecture and the layout engine used. When authoring documents for the Web, information from the user agent string can be valuable in determining how best to mark-up documents.
Getting the information is easy.
Screenshot of a Lightview modal dialog
Following is a list of cross-browser/platform web development and debugging tools useful for client-side developers. Depending on the application, one or all of these tools can be valuable in completing work on a website front-end.