One of my website’s users is experiencing Javascript problems with his IE8/WinXP setup, with code execution apparently aborting halfway through, but there are no alert boxes or other hints as to why and I’m unable to replicate the problem locally. How can I get any information out of his system, so I can start debugging this?
Just figuring out where the code aborts would be very helpful, but AFAIK IE8 doesn’t have anything like Firefox’s Error Console that just logs warnings. I know IE8 has Developer Tools built-in, but is it of any use if the user is not a developer?
The following question suggests logging in remotely to the client’s system, but I’m not sure this will be possible to arrange.
The user can turn on Javascript logging in IE8, if they are tech-savvy enough. (It’s not hard, but we all know how good users normally are with computers…):
Get them to go to
Internet Options -> Advanced. There is a “Display a notification about every script error” option, which should be checked. This should now cause all Javascript errors to be logged – you can view them, iirc, by clicking on a yellow warning triangle which will appear on websites where there is broken Javascript (aka, almost every website in the world…). The user could then copy this information to you.It does rely on the user being fairly tech-savvy – you really just want to get at their machine tbh.