Is there a way to open Chrome Dev tools to a new window right away?

Question

Anyone know of a way to open Chrome Dev tools to a new window upon open?

I know that I can click F12 and then click the 'customize' button and change orientation or pop out the dev tools window. But that's an extra step, and often a window resize is necessary, and when you do it 50 times a day, it gets to be tedious.

Also, sometimes, on pages I'm testing, pressing F12 will change the layout of the elements on the page and even popping out the dev tools leaves the page layout different than before I opened dev tools. This can make it hard to tell if an element is visible or not, which makes troubleshooting Webdriver more difficult.

Ideally, CTRL+F12 or something to open dev tools as a separate window would be super handy. (to any Chromium devs that might be listening ;) But if anyone has another solution, I'd love to hear it.

Answer 1

If you have your DevTools un-docked, the dock mode, size and position of your DevTools window will remain the same as you previously set it. For example, I just set mine to be maximised on my other monitor. Every time I open up DevTools, it's an un-docked, maximised window, and there's no change to the layout of the inspected window other than the fact it's no longer in focus.

You could alternatively launch Chrome using the --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs flag, which will automatically open DevTools in the dock mode, size and position you had it previously. You can use:

Mac:/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs

Windows: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs

In WebDriver, you can set flags for how Chrome opens. However, after looking into this further, it turns out Chrome currently do not support multiple clients connected to the protocol simultaneously.

As for speeding things up, you can switch between dock positions with Cmd+Shift+D (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+D (Windows). This toggles between the last two modes you have used, so say you have it docked at the bottom, you then pop it out, using the shortcut now will toggle between the two.