Firefox

Install Firebug

Important note about firefox3

Firebug isn't working properly in Firefox 3 beta (coming by default with Ubuntu Hardy).
We recommend installing firefox 2 separately to get a more stable debugging environment.  Below is a strategy to keep this firefox 2 installment completely separated from your distribution's defaults. (This involves adding a new user to ensure that the settings and profiles (kept in hidden files in the user's home directory) are not conflicting.

  1. # adduser ffx2
  2. download the tgz of ffx2 from http://getfirefox.com, and copy that to ~ffx2/
  3. install the software as this new user 'ffx2'
    1. $ su - ffx2;
    2. $ mkdir local; cd local
    3. $ tar zxvf zxvf ../fire*tar.gz
    4. $ cd firefox
  4. still as ffx2: create a fresh profile (ubuntu seems to populate it with some default settings only making sense to ffx3)
    1. $ ./firefox/firefox --profileManager
  5. add some useful start-stop scripts (so you don't have to change users to run ffx2)
    1. $ vi .bash_aliases
        #launch ffx with param passing
  ffx2() {
    xhost +;  
    sudo su - ffx2 -c "export DISPLAY=:0.0; ~/local/firefox/firefox $* &"; 
  } 
    2.   # kill it off in case it hangs
  kffx2() {
    sudo killall -u ffx2 -s 9 -r firefox
  }

Internet Explorer

option 1: DebugBar / Companion.js

Installation involves:

option 2: Visual Web Developer Express

Installation involves:

  • Download and (lengthy) install, plus a required reboot half-way.
  • Registration (and getting a windows live id) to obtain a free key

Recommended usage trick from Bernie.