Question

I’ve always been told that when debugging an application, JavaScript’s console.log() method is preferred over simply using an alert() method. Why is this? Is there a good example someone can point me to where console.log() is obviously the better choice?

Answer 1

• alert() is blocking
• alert() cannot be easily suppressed in non-debug environment
• console typically formats your objects nicely and allows to traverse them
• logging statements often have an interactive pointer to code which issued logging statement
• you cannot look at more than one alert() message at a time
• consoles can have different logging levels with intuitive formatting