Somewhat offtopic: Stepping through the rendering process in browsers?

The web applications get more and more complex these days, especially
with AJAX techniques, but the process of "building up" a rendered web
page still is sequential and runs within a timeframe that is visible to
the user. Actually, the browsers these days tend to make it even more
sequential than in the old days, having realized that users often prefer
to see at least fragmentary results as early as possible rather than
waiting for a while in front of a blank screen and then having a fully
rendered page presented in one snap.

So my question -- which is a bit offtopic but then again, it isn't:

Do the major web browsers offer a development mode similar to the
ability of stepping through programming code line by line in a desktop
compiler? In my web development practice, I sometimes run into
situations where the intermediate results that happen while a page is
"building up" look "weird" -- and sometimes, if the connection is lost
or something similar happens, they "stick", so the user ends up with
half-rendered elements, some of them ending up off-canvas etc.

I would be interested in seeing an ability to somehow view the process
of building up a page in "slo-mo", or have a step-by-step tracking
utility that would allow me to step through the rendering process.
Perhaps this might be a separate utility that would allow the developer
to simply step through the single http requests (while suspending the
timeout limits of the browser at the same time).

Is something like that available? (For the popular browser platforms
like Mozilla/Firefox, WebKit/Safari, IE, Opera).

Thanks,
Adam

Received on Friday, 13 February 2009 13:04:52 UTC