JavaScript debugging on Safari for Windows

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Just had to do this and thought I’d post it for anyone who might find it helpful. Here is how you enable the Debug menu if you’re running windows:

1. Navigate to the folder below (replace USERNAME with your user account).
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\

2. open up Preferences.plist and add the following two lines anywhere before the line “</dict>”

<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
<true />

3. Restart and you should now have a Debug menu.

IE7, removeChild and SSL

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

We recently launched some items into an environment and an JS bug appeared when deleting a DIV. The bug is slightly difficult to debug in that all versions of IE are especially “blind” when it comes to error handling. Here’s the criteria:

  • page is being requested in mode
  • div has a background image in the form url(/path/to/image.extension)
  • the use of the removeChild function

 
Any time the specific div gets removeChild’d AND it contains a background css style, IE will prompt the user the page contains non-secure elements right before it gets removed.

To get around this, delete the background css style before calling the removeChild function. has also released two alternate fixes.