[dmethvin]

Chrome's debugger is darned near a full dev environment at this point, it's just not documented all that well and a lot of the best stuff has only been added recently. You can even edit the files, run the edited code, and save the changes locally.

You know what's really good about the Chrome debugger? It's free and it's on every computer that runs Chrome. Visual Studio is neither of those. I really wish they built VS functionality into the IE debugger.

As far as showing variables, one trick I use a lot is to set a conditional breakpoint where the code to execute is `console.log(stuff), false` so that it just logs stuff but doesn't ever stop. That's also handy for "fixing" variable values without stopping.

[simplyinfinity]

VS is free , well , at least the express version , which is more than enough for web development. personally , I prefer to debug JS in VS than than in Chrome. The chrome debugger never really worked well for me or did stuff as I would expect them.

[ryanmolden]

Does it have conditional breakpoints and tracing breakpoints? I find the latter mostly entirely eliminate the need to sprinkle printf-equivalents to follow complex flows. For full disclosure I work on VS, but not the debugger or in Javascript, and I really don't know about Chrome's dev tools, but having seen some people's approaches to debugging JS, it feels like it is in a relatively primitive state from what I am used to in other languages.

[dmethvin]

Yes and yes.

[ryanmolden]

I see conditional breakpoints, where are the tracing variety?

EDIT: Oh, I see, from your comment you are just leveraging the conditional breakpoint to ad-hoc them. That works but is a bit uglier than truly supported tracing breakpoints, and wouldn't appear to offer things like dumping the callstack to the output window or only triggering the print out only when specific conditions are met (i.e. a conditional tracing breakpoint). I suppose you could ad-hoc that as well by surrounding the print code with an if(<condition>) { print stuff }, <condition>. Works, hacky, but works I suppose.

[mattmanser]

VS is free.