I encountered a rather obscure IE bug at work this week. After coding up a series of text inputs that enable/disable other radio buttons based on their values, I was dismayed to find out my javascript code wasn’t working in a test environment. I opened Internet Explorer’s F12 Developer Tools to check for any errors. Unfortunately, the javascript console was useless; nothing was there! No errors, no warnings, nothing. Maybe the console hadn’t recorded an error because it wasn’t open at the time or something, I thought. So I entered another value and found that the javascript was all of a sudden activated! The radio buttons were disabled appropriately and the console was displaying my console.log statements. I was confused. I attempted several other scenarios and variations of input, attempting to lock down what exactly was causing my code to become active. No luck. Fortunately, a colleague of mine had experienced this exact problem before and let me know how to fix it.
Simply remove the console.log lines.
Did you know that console.log does not work in IE unless you have the F12 Dev Tools open?! I sure as hell didn’t. And not only doesn’t work, it breaks other javascript on the page too.
Here is a stackoverflow link that explains the issue in more detail.
So I learned my lesson here, be certain that all javascript debug statements are removed from my code before delivering it.
