I love Chris Pederick’s developer toolbar for Firefox. It is user friendly has a ton of useful features – my favorites are CSS editing and the ability to display on-screen element information. Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) also has a developer toolbar, straight from Microsoft – but how does it stack up against Chris Pederick’s creation?

Despite the inherent disadvantage of being part of the standards-shy IE*, the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar does have some helpful features. Like Pederick’s toolbar it features validation of various document types through the W3C and has a helpful “View DOM” feature that breaks down the DOM of the page, promoting easier JavaScript and DOM scripting development. An interesting “Show Ruler” function also allows users to measure distances on screen, but I’m skeptical of its real-world value. The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar has fewer features than Pederick’s Firefox version.

Although the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar tries to elevate IE’s status as a developer’s browser, it actually does very little encourage its use as a serious development tool. I’ve learned that standards compliance the most important factor when choosing a browser for development – so that’s why I’ll continue to primarily use Firefox for development and IE for compatibility testing.

*I’m referring to IE version 6 and lower. I have not yet tested IE7 extensively.