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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