Return Chrome developer tools "computed" to expand/collapse style

Question

Since upgrading Chrome, somewhere around version 43.0.2357.81 m the layout of Computed Styles has now changed.

It used to format like this (sorry SO won't let me include images!):

http://i.stack.imgur.com/30GVK.png

e.g showing the hierarchy of inheritance underneath the style attribute. Since the update, it doesn't show the inheritance for each style attribute, and you instead have to click a search icon for each individual attribute, and open it in another tab:

www.davidbranford.net/chrome_new.png

This new behaviour is really hurting my workflow. Does anybody know how to revert to the old behaviour? A chrome flag perhaps?

While we're there, why can't you just click a colour representation in the developer tools to toggle between RGB/HEX/HSL? Frustrating sometimes when harmless but useful functionality is removed.

Thanks in advance, David

Answer 1

YES!

I couldn't agree more.

This change really hurts the usability of the tool. It's the main reason why I still reach for Firebug, although Chrome is superior to Firefox in several respects (for my purposes).

Funny thing is the documentation still shows the old (superior) layout:

https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/elements-styles

The only solution I can think of is to install an older version of Chrome. I'm on Ubuntu so I could try a previous version from this page:

http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/pm/google-chrome-stable

where I could install e.g. version 42. However you would probably need to switch off auto-update, and you need to be careful with the app data (favorites and so on). More details here:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/485856/how-do-i-downgrade-google-chrome

Too much trouble, I didn't bother to try this out, even though this is really annoying. I'll mix and match using Chrome Dev tools with Firebug, probably.

Oh, and by the way I see a discussion about exactly this issue on the Google Chrome/Chromium forum:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=496263

The reply to someone asking why this change was made:

"This is an expected change in behavior. This probably needs evangelism to let developers know why this change is better than the previous mode."

I've posted a comment on that Chromium forum to ask what the reason for this change is.

Answer 2

Well, after some days of going crazy not finding where the magnifying glass went, I found this thread.

It seems that, as of December 2015, Chrome version 47.0.2526.80 m, the behaviour of the styles inspector has changed again, more according to the one requested by David Brandorf and Levo van den Bulck. But completely against my needs, though.

So I posted a comment in the same Chrome issue thread stated here, but in a more diplomatic way, asking for BOTH behaviours to be supported, which should be fairly easy to accomplish:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=496263#c20