IE 7 and password fields

Posted by John
on Thursday, 06 March 2008

Quick Note. Unlike Firefox, Internet Explorer handles password fields a little differently, blanking out whatever value you pass it within a 'value' tag.

So...

Will have a password box in Firefox starred out, but in IE it'll appear blank.

To get around this you can use Prototype to inject a value into the password field, so the user see's it as starred out.

$('mypass').value='**';

Note, if you're generating the form dynamically with...

var innerhtml='

Only fire your $('mypass') code after the form has been written to the page otherwise you won't be able to get a handle on it (most cases you won't ever have this problem).

IE Debugging Tools

Posted by John
on Monday, 25 February 2008

It's hard to do but these might help,

  • X-Ray, a bookmarklet to examine elements within the document model, similar to firebug's 'inspect'.

  • Fiddler, an http debugger for ie 6/7

  • IE Developer Toolbar, similar in power to firebug but in no way as comprehensive.

  • IETester, full-blown IE6 standalone browser, finally you can test against IE6 on Vista!