Most of the web designer & developers are using some sort of tool like IE tester or a separate machine running IE 6 or IE 7 to check for compatibility errors with these browsers. Also, historically it’s been hard to debug for IE 6 & 7 as we do not have something like Firebug for Internet Explorer.

Some of us already know about the web developer toolbar for Internet Explorer, but today Microsoft released a new visual debugging tool for Internet Explorer called Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer (Microsoft, please hire someone to come up with short names for your product). Its like IE tester but from Microsoft, means it has the native real engine of IE 6 & IE 7 not something emulated which some people think IETester has. (Its wrong though, IETester has the same DLL as IE 6).

The difference between IETester & SuperPreview is that in IE Tester you cannot debug or see which HTML element is affected & which part of the CSS is giving problem but in SuperPreview you can see the web page in IE 6 as well as IE7/8 side by side so it is easy to know which part is getting affected & then you can easily target that element. Like in the current screenshot, I am checking the rendered HTML in IE 6 & IE 8 side by side. If there is some anomaly in IE 6 but not in IE 8 then I know which HTML element or CSS is breaking.

SuperPreview for Internet Explorer

However, this isn’t all that we require. This indeed is a great effort from Microsoft to move the existing web pages from IE 6 to IE 8 but it would have been better if we can get the functionality of IE Developer toolbar in SuperPreview. Now, that is indeed available in expression web 3.0 but that is a paid software, what if we just want to test & see what’s broken & fix is quickly.