Internet Explorer is often decried as the worst browser for web developers, but IE8 actually offers a very nice set of developer tools. Here we’ll look at a unique way
to use them
to edit the text on any webpage.
How to edit text in a webpage
IE8’s developer tools make it easy
to make changes
to a webpage and view them directly. Simply browse
to the webpage of your choice, and press the F12 key on your keyboard. Alternately, you can click the Tools button, and select Developer tools from the list.
This opens the developer tools.
To do our editing, we want
to select the mouse button on the toolbar “Select Element by Click” tool.
Now, click on any spot of the webpage in IE8 that you want
to edit. Here, let’s edit the footer of Google.com. Notice it places a blue box around any element you hover over
to make it easy
to choose exactly what you want
to edit.
In the developer tools window, the element you selected before is now highlighted. Click the plus button beside that entry if the text you want
to edit is not visible.
Now, click the text you wish
to change, and enter what you wish in the box. For fun, we changed the copyright
to say “©2010 Microsoft”.
Go back
to IE
to see the changes on the page!
You can also change a link on a page this way:
Or you can even change the text on a button:
Here’s our edited Google.com:
This may be fun for playing a trick on someone or simply for a funny screenshot, but it can be very useful, too. You could test
how changes in fontsize would change
how a website looks, or see
how a button would look with a different label. It can also be useful when taking screenshots. For instance, if I want
to show a friend
how to do something in Gmail but don’t want
to reveal my email address, I could edit the text on the top right before I took the screenshot. Here I changed my Gmail address
to [email protected].
Please note that the changes will disappear when you reload the page. You can save your changes from the developer tools window, though, and reopen the page from your computer if you wish.
We have found this trick very helpful at times, and it can be very fun too! Enjoy it, and let us know
how you used it
to help you!
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