Disable automatic saving of CSS changes in Chrome Developer Tools

Question

I am referring to the save feature in the 'Sources' panel of the Chrome Dev Tools. I have been using this feature for a long time in the stable release of Chrome, but after installing the build from the developer channel, I notice that once I have saved the file the first time, Chrome no longer prompts me to save and just does it automatically after every change I make.

This is quite a pain, as I make a lot of changes experimentally in the dev tools whilst debugging which I don't wish to save, I would like Chrome to save the file only when I explicitly tell it to.

Does anyone know if there is a way to disable this automatic CSS saving?

(Apologies for no screenshot, my PrtScn key seemingly won't operate when I am in a context menu)

Update:

I have reverted to the current stable build, 27.0.1453.93, and the behaviour appears to be the same.

Answer 1

I am having the same problem, I can only offer workarounds: use another browser, such as Firefox, for doing tests!

Alternatively you could launch another instance of Chrome with a different profile. You could also launch a Chrome "Incognito Window", it seems to not apply the filesystem mappings.

I normally use an Incognito Window or inline styles to test changes.

Answer 2

Alas, I learned after reading a post by Google's dev relations person that the automatic save cannot be disabled and it seems that's the way it's going to stay. html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/revolutions2013

– tommypyatt Feb 21 '14 at 14:22

Answer 3

While not solving the issue directly, it is a decent work around:

In Chrome, in the css inspector you can click and hold the + button, then choose to add your changes to the inspector-stylesheet. It's not as convenient as directly editing in your css-selectors, but what you write will all be in inspector-stylesheet.css, so not saved to your project. Then when you are happy with your changes, you can manually put them in to your css.