You cannot write to the console directly from untrusted JavaScript (e.g. scripts coming from a page). However, even if installing Firebug does not appeal to you, I'd recommend checking out Firebug Lite, which requires no installation into the browser (nor, in fact, does it even require Firefox). It's a script which you can include into any web page (even dynamically), which will give you some basic Firebug functionality (such as console.log()).