Do more with Chrome Developer Tools

Do more with Chrome Developer Tools: The Chrome Developer Tools team recently launched new features and made several UI changes to improve your development and debugging workflow.

Develop for mobile 

Since we launched Chrome for Android, you’ve been able to use Chrome Developer Tools to debug and profile mobile web pages and web apps.

Today, we take this feature one step further by introducing device emulation support in Chrome Developer Tools. Device emulation includes, among other things, native User Agent and dimension overriding. This allows developers to debug mobile browsers on different devices and operating systems via the Settings Menu. So, now, you can emulate the exact device metrics of devices like the Galaxy Nexus and the iPhone to test your media query-driven design.

Chrome Developer Tools also supports single touch event emulation to make it easier to debug mobile applications on the desktop.

Profile rendering performance 

The Timeline’s Frame Mode feature now allows you to profile Chrome’s rendering performance, remove the jank and deliver the silky smooth performance users expect from your apps. To learn more about this topic, check out the recent "Jank Busters" video from Google I/O.



Preview your log items

The console now prints a user-friendly snapshot of the object properties taken at log time, whereas by expanding the object manually, you can still see its live content. This is especially useful when logging an object in a loop and observing its mutation. With this change, we resolved a longstanding bug many of you prioritized on crbug.com.



Play with experimental features

You can now try new experimental features in Chrome Developer Tools by visiting chrome:flags and enabling them there. Once you do that, a new tab called “Experiments” will be visible in the settings menu, allowing you to enable and use any of the following experiments:

• Snippets (essentially multi-line console on steroids) 
• Source mapping support for SASS 
• Native memory profiling 
• Geolocation / orientation override 
• FileSystem inspection 
• Canvas inspection 
• CPU activity in Timeline 
• CSS Regions support 

Some of these experimental features are almost ready while others have just landed and need some more refining. In either case, we’d love your feedback before we bake these fully in Chrome Developer Tools. You can also read our recently updated contribution guide if you’re interested in helping us make the tools better.

To get more information on all of Chrome Developer Tools features, check out our “Chrome Developer Tools Evolution” talk at the I/O 2012. You can also follow Google Chrome Developers on Google+ or @ChromiumDev on Twitter for more news on changes landing in Chrome Developer Tools.

Posted by Stefano Cazzulani, Product Manager