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For those of you who do front-end development, what browser do you tend to use? I mean, of course you have to eventually do some work in whatever browsers you intend to support, but what do you prefer for the primary development, and why?

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Does Silverlight development count? – ChrisF♦ Sep 8 '10 at 18:26

closed as not constructive by Walter, gnat, ElYusubov, MainMa, Thomas Owens♦ Nov 12 '12 at 13:22

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6 Answers

up vote 10 down vote accepted

Firefox / Firebug. Also chrome has a similar built in dev environment.

But of course you'll have to use all browsers at some point to verify it works.

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up vote 5 down vote

Chrome.

In my experience, it is the best browser for everything outside of a corporate limitation. The console and development tools are sufficiently powerful to rival Firebug.

I will test in IE8 as well and have found that if you can make something work in Chrome and IE8, the odds are that the rest of the browsers will do just fine.

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When I first found the Dev console in Chrome, it took me back that it was as (or more) powerful than Firebug. And its built in! – TheLQ Sep 8 '10 at 21:00
@TheLQ - Where is it? – burnt_hand Sep 30 '10 at 10:04
Found it - "Spanner -> Tools -> Developer Tools" or just Ctrl+Shift+I – burnt_hand Sep 30 '10 at 10:07
up vote 1 down vote

Firefox and Chrome. Mostly because of the development plugins. IETab makes it easy to see how IE has screwed up your web page.

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IETab... I'm going to have to take a look at that – TheLQ Sep 8 '10 at 21:00
up vote 1 down vote

Firefox (3.6), primarly because I use it also for daily navigation, then because of Firebug and some other plugins (TamperData above all).

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up vote 1 down vote

Firefox with the following plugins

  • Firebug - for inspecting dom elements, javascript debugging and live css testing
  • LiveHTTPHeaders - see if a server is behaving as it should, especially with redirects and setting cookies.
  • Web Develpoer Toolbar - Disable caching. Outline tables and divs.
  • Console2 - improves the standard error console that comes with Firefox.

These plugins overlap each other in areas, but each offer something unique that I couldn't live without.

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up vote 0 down vote

I use Safari and/or Chrome (on the Mac). Why? Firebug is lovely, but I use Firefox as my main browser and I've got a bunch of quite bizarre extensions set up on there. I mean, bizarre to the point where other programmers say "what the hell?" when they look at my screen. This is not a good testing environment, but it is perfect for me. When I'm testing front-end code, I need to be using a normal browser without all my weird extensions. Safari or Chrome fit perfectly. Once I'm done with development, I'll boot up a clean Windows VM with Internet Explorer and Firefox in it to do final testing, and use a clean account on the Mac for testing in all the browsers on there.

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