In my previous post, I neglected to mention IE8's inability to work with the console object. It does work, but only if the debug tools are open when loading the page. As far as I know, there's no way to get it functioning with the tools closed. The best way to move forward to prevent the console functions breaking your script is to instantiate them all one-by-one, setting them to an empty function. Obviously this is useless in terms of logging, but that's many times better than breaking anything.

Again, I don't take any credit for the following code. This segment was taken from "plugins.js" of the html5 boiler plate project on github:

(function() {
    var method;
    var noop = function () {};
    var methods = [
        'assert', 'clear', 'count', 'debug', 'dir', 'dirxml', 'error',
        'exception', 'group', 'groupCollapsed', 'groupEnd', 'info', 'log',
        'markTimeline', 'profile', 'profileEnd', 'table', 'time', 'timeEnd',
        'timeStamp', 'trace', 'warn'
    ];
    var length = methods.length;
    var console = (window.console = window.console || {});

    while (length--) {
        method = methods[length];

        // Only stub undefined methods.
        if (!console[method]) {
            console[method] = noop;
        }
    }
}());

The function simply checks the presence of each "function" on console object and instantiates it. We use a variation of this code in most of our projects at my work. Unfortunately IE8 support is imperative for a lot of our clients.