If you’re a web developer and you've ever worked on the client side then you've almost certainly used the incredible Firebug. If you work regularly in IE you may have also used the fantastic IE web tool bar. However, IE8 is the first browser to actually build one of these clever little add-ons right into the browser.

You can find the new feature in IE8 in Tools > Developer tools. Here are my favorite 10 things about it:

1. It has a colour picker.
   It's inherited one of the tiny tools from the IE web toolbar that allows you to click the colour picker then select any point on the web page and be told it's Hex value.
2. JavaScript Debugging
   Add watch's, Breaks, inject code using the console, Pause, play, step over, step into and step out. All the standard debugging features you expect in server side technologies but actually debugging client side JavaScript. If you’re an AJAX developer... you’re going to love it!
3. Simple Prototyping 
   Every change you make to the HTML or CSS is immediately reflected in the browser. This makes it easy to take a page and edit the CSS or HTML on the fly. Once your happy with the changes you can just click to save the files.
4. Profiling.
   Set off profiling and you can view all of the JavaScript functions and the order they were run in during the profiling session. It details how long each function took, the line number of the code that was executed and if you click on it, it takes you to the source code that was being executed.
5. Source Searching
   You can do this easily enough in notepad but searching through the HTML in the new Developer tools makes it easy to find text and see it’s context on the HTML tree. Also if you right click on the search item it’ll ask you if you want to copy the word, The inner HTML or the Outer HTML; which makes it really easy to cut and paste the actual content you want.
6. Layout View
   If you can’t get your head around the layout of a particular object. Click on the html or select the element by click then switch to Layout View to be given a graphical representation of the margin, padding, spacing and border for the selected object.
7. Simple Resize
   Click Tools > resize to resize the browser window to either: 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x768, 1280x1024 or set up a custom size. This enables you to test web pages in different screen resolutions quickly and easily.
8. View Image information
   Click on Image > Show Image Sizes for all the image sizes to be shown onscreen, so you can easily see if any are larger than they need to be. Other Information that can be displayed includes, File Locations, dimensions and alt text.
9. Element Highlighting
   Click on Outline and make IE Visually outline Tables, Divs, Table Cells or Images.
10. It’s baked in
    As Developer tools is a part of the browser and not an add-in, it’s more efficient than the old IE Web Toolbar. This is because of the way Add-ons work in IE. Even if you are not using an Add-on it has it’s open thread working in the background for each tab or window you have open.  As the new toolbar is actually part of the browser itself you can browse regularly in a separate tab or window without the overhead of having the toolbar switched on in the background.

On the front of MSN the other day an unfortunate flaming flash advert for Hellboy the movie covered up a story about the Madrid plane crash.

Photosynth is released today which will mean we can all do some crazy things with your photos in a 3d space. I saw photosynth show on ted.com a year or so ago and it has jaw dropping potential.

Basically (from what i Understand) you can upload your pictures and photosynth looks at the images and groups them with other users to create 3d environments from your 2d pictures.

However when I went to install I got the following message:

The Photosynth site is a little overwhelmed

I hope it come up today because I really want to mess around with it.

Great new silverlight site are now becoming a daily occurance, the new Grid Girls website shows how hot silverlight can look:

http://www.singtelrace.com/SingTel-Grid-Girls_Heart-Race.aspx

My favourite thing about running a website is, without a doubt, looking over the Google statistics and seeing the search term that people used to get to my site.

It's fantastic thinking that someone typed in "buy turtles blimp" and managed to find themselves reading one of my stupid stories, can you imagine their disappointment. I just quickly looked over all the search terms used this month, the following are ones that jumped out at me.

• "calories in morrison's spare ribs"
• Check the pack; Don't search the net. I'm guessing 200 per rib.
• "different ways to say asp.net"
• There is only one way A. S. P. DOT net
• "furby island solution"
• I Wasn't even aware there was a furby Island problem
• "i love wotsits"
• Who doesn't. But why would you bother searching this in Google. What did they expect to find? Sounds like someone has a very very dull job.
• "jingoistic "
• I Googled this my self a few months back when I didn't know what it meant. I'm glad too see someone else shares my problems.
• "lyrics to if i knew you were coming i'd a baked a cake"
• I can help with this one. If i knew you were coming i'd have baked a cake, backed a cake, baked a cake, if i knew you were coming I'd have backed a cake. That's it!
• "morrisons newquay this weekend"
• I wonder what was going on at morrisons newquay this weekend. Was it some sort of dogging meeting? I've just realised if it was then the next person to search for it will wind up on this page. If your that person please be sure to comment.

The best thing about this is the more I put these phrases on my website the next person who types in "I Love Wotsits" may very well wind up reading this. By the way If you are that person please comment and let us know just how much you love Wotsits.

Looks as though MSN.com have started displaying Silverlight on their frontpage. It’s about time Silverlight started cropping up on Microsoft's heavy weight sites.

I wonder when we’ll see it on Live.com?

Yesterday I saw the first silverlight website that made me say Wow from a design point rather than just a technology point, the jaw drop was provided by the talented guys over at Klaklak. There new Silverlight Portfolio is Super pretty. See http://www.klaklakgroup.com/.

Also if your still not convinced about silverlight or it's purpose checkout The http://www.nbcolympics.com website. Silverlight has managed to deliver the most watched media event ever. The backbone used to deliver these programmes live is nothing short of ground breaking. Showing scalability that is just not possible with Flash.

With In excess of 8 million downloads per day Silverlight is catching up with adobe quickly with penetration. At last count 40% of the people that visit this site have silverlight installed. It'll be interesting to see how that figure rises in the next few weeks.