ssPowerTools for IE

IE Context Menu Power Toolset

2008-03-26: UPDATE

ssPowerTools is here for history only.

Last time I worked on it was 2004, and I've been developing/debugging with Firefox and Chris Pederick's great Web Developer and Joe Hewitt's awesome Firebug extensions as much as possible since then. Do the same and enjoy web development again!

What it is

ssPowerTools for IE is a context menu addon for Internet Explorer. It provides advanced tools for web developers and power users who want or need to dig deeper into a page as it is loaded.

Why

I'm a big fan of power tools like this. I've collected and used a lot over the years, including Microsoft's original Web Accessories and Web Developer Accessories, Matt Kruse's great IE Context Menu Toolset, and IE Booster (back when it was free and more open), and also various custom tools of my own making. There are also many bookmarklets/favelets I use (and wade through), like the JavaScript Interpreter Bookmarklet (a sort of Javascript command prompt for running ad-hoc script on anyone's pages).

The problem I had is that IE's context menu gets cluttered with them, and I "lose" tools the long list. I wanted a better way to organize them. So after research and much labor, ssPowerTools for IE was born, and my context menu is now much more manageable.

Features

URL
- see/copy/paste URL
- open URL in same window/new window
Code
- Execute ad-hoc JScript, VBScript, or Javascript!
dev>Page Structure
- About the Page/About the Browser...
  - various info about the current page and browser
  - Show Full Page Weight - calculates grand total bandwidth used(includes external Objects, Script & CSS includes)
- Toggle Tag Highlights/Borders/Titles
  - enter tagnames (separated by commas) and toggle color highlights, borders or debugging titles for those tags
  - IMG tags show their dimensions & fileSizes
- Show DOM¹
  - dynamic Document Object Model for this page
- Advanced Meta-data...
  - Lists of all Images¹, Links¹, ~~Stylesheets~~, ~~Scripts~~
  - DOM - View entire current DOM as tree¹
  - View Current Source, Original Source
dev>Testing:
- Browser Tests...
  - browser checks and other tests
- Other checks....
  - standards and accessibility tests
- Resize Window
- Colors - view page in lower color depths
dev>Reference:
- Check Character Entity Codes, Hex Color Codes, Browser Stats, Font Stats
Power Browsing:
- Links:
  - Info in Titles - toggles debug info (href, target)
  - Open in New Windows
  - Un-refer - tries to fix "tracker" Link URLs (grabs last http...)
- Toggle:
  - Images/Flash - toggles visibility of all images and Flash
  - Iframes - toggles visibility of IFRAME elementss
  - Hidden Fields - toggles visibility of hidden fields
- Stop Animations - stops all animated GIFs and Flash
- Zoom page
- Google Page Tools...
- View Archived Page (Wayback Machine)
Misc:
- IE Visual Filters...

Planned Features

List Collections: Stylesheets, Scripts
Google search? (doesn't everyone already have the google toolbar?)

Notes

Internet Explorer 6+. It will partially work on IE 5.0 and IE 5.5.
These tools are for the context of the current page only. Future versions will be sensitive to the context of what was clicked on (image, link, selected text, etc).
¹ - these functions were adapted & imported from Microsoft's IE Web Developer Accessories pack.

Installation

Download it here & save somewhere on your hard drive.
Extract the files somewhere (run the .exe file).
Install it by running ssPowerTools_install.bat or .vbs.
Restart Internet Explorer. When you right-click, you'll see the new menu item.

Bugs/Suggestions

ssPowerTools for IE is still actively evolving, so there may be some bugs (nothing bit that I know of right now). Send me detailed bug info & I'll do my best to fix it. I'm also very interested in suggestions for feature improvements/additions.

credits/author

-Rob (@slingfive) Eberhardt, Slingshot Solutions
Use freely, but be honest about it. I just ask for credit.

Ť slingfive.com