Debugging JavaScript With Firefox Console

I’ve just spent the last couple of evenings playing around with SVG in the latest beta release of Firefox, as I have SVG in mind for a potential little side project.

My tests involve quite a lot of JavaScript, which are adding interactivity to the SVG, and as I have mentioned earlier one of the problems I have with JavaScript is trying to figure out what is going at run-time when things don’t go according to plan (but no errors are thrown), this is exactly what was happening with my SVG.

So I needed a quick solution to assist in debugging the JavaScript behind my SVG, my first thought was to create an SVG version of my jsDebug utility as I didn’t want to split the SVG document to mix HTML in (yet). But I didn’t really want to spend time creating this either, so a couple of minutes on trusty Google came up with what I needed.

Debugging JavaScript with log entries describes how to enable the console within Firefox and send messages to it using the dump() method, which was exactly what I needed.

My exploration of SVG continues and hopefully one day I’ll be able to release here the project I have in mind for SVG, it’s looking quite promising so far.