ecmanaut: Relief from noisy Mozilla 1.5 console

2005-10-28

Relief from noisy Mozilla 1.5 console

Ever since I laid hands on my first Mozilla 1.5 beta and couldn't bring myself to switching back (due to the excellent improvements to GreaseMonkey, requiring 1.5), I have been wading through the deep trenches of street CSS the web is infested with. It's of course no news that the web is a dirty place full of ill wrought markup; humans make mistakes, and not half of them know about it, and an even tinier percentile care. After all, a browser is supposed to do a decent job of grokking even broken code, and they often do.

The news was that the Javascript Console in Mozilla started spewing out any hint of a mistake, and styling targeting other browsers, with different perceptions about what can or should be done through CSS, and all sorts of things beyond your reach, and of infinitessimal interest. It was just painful, trying to use the console to sift out your own mistakes from all the background noise of all other windows and tabs full of your average web cruft.

Error: Unknown property 'SCROLLBAR-FACE-COLOR'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://helgon.net/CSS/2.css
Line: 3
Error: Unknown property 'SCROLLBAR-HIGHLIGHT-COLOR'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://helgon.net/CSS/2.css
Line: 4
Error: Unknown property 'SCROLLBAR-SHADOW-COLOR'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://helgon.net/CSS/2.css
Line: 5
Error: Unknown property 'SCROLLBAR-3DLIGHT-COLOR'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://helgon.net/CSS/2.css
Line: 7
Error: Unknown property 'SCROLLBAR-ARROW-COLOR'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://helgon.net/CSS/2.css
Line: 8
Error: Unknown property 'SCROLLBAR-TRACK-COLOR'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://helgon.net/CSS/2.css
Line: 9
Error: Unknown property 'SCROLLBAR-DARKSHADOW-COLOR'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://helgon.net/CSS/2.css
Line: 11
Error: Error in parsing value for property 'padding-top'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.blogger.com/css/navbar/main.css
Line: 20
Error: Unknown property '_border'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.blogger.com/css/navbar/main.css
Line: 26
Error: Unknown property '_display'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.blogger.com/css/navbar/main.css
Line: 27
Error: Unknown property '_margin-top'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.blogger.com/css/navbar/main.css
Line: 42
Error: Error in parsing value for property 'display'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.google.com/ig
Line: 3
Error: Error in parsing value for property 'cursor'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.google.com/ig
Line: 3
Error: Unknown property 'style'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.google.com/ig
Line: 3
Error: Error in parsing value for property 'vertical-align'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.google.com/ig
Line: 3
Error: Error in parsing value for property 'width'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.google.com/ig
Line: 3
Error: Selector expected. Ruleset ignored due to bad selector.
Source File: http://www.google.com/ig
Line: 3
Error: Unexpected end of file while searching for closing } of invalid rule set.
Source File: http://www.google.com/ig
Line: 4
Error: Selector expected. Ruleset ignored due to bad selector.
Source File: http://www.google.com/ig
Line: 20
Error: Unexpected end of file while searching for closing } of invalid rule set.
Source File: http://www.google.com/ig
Line: 21

And so on and so forth. Luckily, relief is to be found, in the blessed Console Filter extension, which at least lets you get rid of most of this junk painlessly.

My quick recipe: Download, install, restart browser, Ctrl+L, about:config, press <enter>, double click extensions.consolefilter.categories to true, Ctrl+Shift+J, Ctrl+K, type @js -chrome:// and press <enter> again to turn on only non-chrome related, javascript, problems. Sit back and relax. Breathe freely. Finally a useful Mozilla 1.5 again for disturbance free web development.

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