How to Debug Remote Browsers

By  on  

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!

Todd Gardner

About Todd Gardner

Todd Gardner is a software entrepreneur and developer who has built multiple profitable products. He pushes for simple tools, maintainable software, and balancing complexity with risk. He is the cofounder of TrackJS and Request Metrics, where he helps thousands of developers build faster and more reliable websites. He also produces the PubConf software comedy show.

Recent Features

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

  • By
    Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript

    If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been working on a super top secret mobile application using Appcelerator Titanium.  The experience has been great:  using JavaScript to create easy to write, easy to test, native mobile apps has been fun.  My...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Dojo Lightbox with dojox.image.Lightbox

    One of the reasons I love the Dojo Toolkit is that it seems to have everything.  No scouring for a plugin from this site and then another plugin from that site to build my application.  Buried within the expansive dojox namespace of Dojo is

  • By
    Modal-Style Text Selection with Fokus

    Every once in a while I find a tiny JavaScript library that does something very specific, very well.  My latest find, Fokus, is a utility that listens for text selection within the page, and when such an event occurs, shows a beautiful modal dialog in...

Discussion

  1. that’s kind of awesome

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!