The Chrome Developer Tools is a set of web-building toolkits that are directly built into the Chrome browser. It is a front-end developer toolkit mainly used for debugging, editing, and optimizing web pages.
If you’re a website owner or developer, Chrome Developer Tools offers various functions you may use to optimize your website for better user experience, test device compatibility, and improve SEO ranking.
So, even if you have little to no programming knowledge as a website owner or a budding developer, it is pretty good to learn the basic use of Chrome Developer Tools. First, we’ll show how you may access the Developer Tools in Chrome.
Using keyboard Shortcuts
The easiest way to open Developer Tools in Chrome is by using the keyboard shortcuts. you may simply press theCtrl + Shift + Chotkey to directly access the Elements tab in Developer Tools. The Elements tab will show the attributes and CSS of all the elements present on the webpage.
If you’re trying to run Javascript or check the log and error messages of a webpage, you might want to access the Console tab in Developer Tools. you may use theCtrl + Shift + Jshortcut key to go directly to the Console tab.
Lastly, you may either use theCtrl + Shift + Ior theF12key to access the last active tab in Developer Tools. For MacOS, the shortcut keys are roughly the same, and you only need to swap out theCtrlkey with theCommandkey and theShiftkey with theOptionkey to perform the equivalent shortcut.
Using Chrome User Interface
Another way you may open Developer Tools in Chrome is from the user interface itself. If you want to inspect the attributes of any element in Developer Tools, you can simply right-click it and selectInspect. It will directly access the Elements tab and lead you to the corresponding element attributes.
you may also go to theChrome menuin the top right, selectMore tools, and click onDeveloper toolsto open it. This will lead you to the last active tab in your Developer Tools.
How to Use Chrome Developer Tools?
you may use Chrome Developer Tools for a variety of purposes like inspecting and editing a page’s HTML elements, debugging your code, viewing log files, and also measuring a webpage’s performance.
However, any changes you make in Chrome Developer Tools are only temporary and only affect the client side. As soon as you reload the webpage, the changes should revert back. Nonetheless, these temporary changes are still very useful for further optimizing a website.
While you are certainly expected to have a little programming knowledge to use Chrome Developer Tools, you may still get some basic use out of it with no programming knowledge.
Before we begin, let’s get you a basic rundown of the few key tabs in Developer Tools.