Use jQuery in Firebug or Chrome Inspector

The Chrome Inspector (or, on old Firefox, Firebug) rocks! It lets you inspect HTML, change CSS, and debug javascript—
plus, it’s a great way to noodle around on a page you’re developing or some random page on the web. Now and again I find myself in the console, wishing that
jQuery was at my disposal, e.g., I want to manipulate the page in some way or print out a list of page content into the console (easy manipulation of data + copy and paste).

Normally you can’t do this unless the page is already using jQuery… unless you have a nifty bookmarklet that will add it to the page for you:

Here’s the bookmarklet Add jQuery Install it by dragging it to your bookmarks toolbar.

And here’s the code—pretty simple:

javascript:(function(url) {
 var s = document.createElement('script');
 s.src = url;
 (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] ||
  document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(s);
})('https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.1/jquery.min.js')

This will work for any javascript console, and you can easily change the url at the end of the code snippet to be any script you want. Enjoy!

Now if I could just get Firebug to never crash Firefox… Update: years later, I’ve really just been using the Chrome web inspector.

Note: if you try to reference $ from the Firebug console before loading jQuery onto a page, then it returns a function from within the Firebug code that’s just a wrapper around document.getElementById. Once you add jQuery to your page, you’ll only be able to reference it from the console as jQuery, since the other $ now exists inside the scope of the console. On the other hand, if you load jQuery first, $ should work as the jQuery object within the console.