How to Debug Remote Browsers

It's super frustrating when bugs pop up only in a remote browser. Something about that user, that device, or that environment is different, but I don't know what! And of course, I can't recreate it on my local development machine.

The team at TrackJS came up with a cool way to connect and debug these remote browsers that we call RemoteJS. RemoteJS is a free service where you can attach a simplified JavaScript debugger to a remote browser. The debugger provides a remote console where you can see logs, url, network events, and execute commands. You can even pull a remote screenshot.

To use it, just create a new "debugger channel" for agents to connect to. Connecting the agent is with a JavaScript snippet to attach to the browser and establishes a websocket connection back to the web debugger. You can deploy it conditionally to catch an annoying heisenbug, perhaps activating if the `?debug` querystring is present. You can also execute it directly or as a bookmarklet if you can't do a deploy.

RemoteJS can help make the most frustrating kind of bugs a little less painful. Give it a try!

About Todd Gardner

Todd H Gardner is the president and co-founder of TrackJS, an error monitoring service for modern JavaScript applications. With over a decade of experience building web applications for large enterprises and startups, Todd has seen how the web fails.

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