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de90 | 13 years ago

No GP but, personally I don't feel it's as good as the VS debugger. Unless I am missing something you still have to type into the console to get the value of things you want instead of just hovering over things, or bringing up quick watch in visual studio.

Also I'd imagine (haven't used it yet!) if you change the source in visual studio while debugging it would save to a file, while I cannot do that in chrome. I think I've heard it's possible in chrome, but never really seen how.

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dmethvin|13 years ago

Chrome's debugger is darned near a full dev environment at this point, it's just not documented all that well and a lot of the best stuff has only been added recently. You can even edit the files, run the edited code, and save the changes locally.

You know what's really good about the Chrome debugger? It's free and it's on every computer that runs Chrome. Visual Studio is neither of those. I really wish they built VS functionality into the IE debugger.

As far as showing variables, one trick I use a lot is to set a conditional breakpoint where the code to execute is `console.log(stuff), false` so that it just logs stuff but doesn't ever stop. That's also handy for "fixing" variable values without stopping.

simplyinfinity|13 years ago

VS is free , well , at least the express version , which is more than enough for web development. personally , I prefer to debug JS in VS than than in Chrome. The chrome debugger never really worked well for me or did stuff as I would expect them.

ryanmolden|13 years ago

Does it have conditional breakpoints and tracing breakpoints? I find the latter mostly entirely eliminate the need to sprinkle printf-equivalents to follow complex flows. For full disclosure I work on VS, but not the debugger or in Javascript, and I really don't know about Chrome's dev tools, but having seen some people's approaches to debugging JS, it feels like it is in a relatively primitive state from what I am used to in other languages.