Why does Chrome say I’m offline whenever I have my DevTools open?

Question

Something weird is happening with Google Chrome. I open any site, doesn’t matter if I open google.com or just any development I’m working on. At first, it works perfectly fine, but if I open the developer tools, by either pressing F12 or right-clicking on any element to inspect it, the page won’t load again, telling me that there is no internet:

No matter how many times I press F5 to reload the site, if the developer tools are open, it simply won’t reload the page. But if I close the tools (not the browser, it remains open) and press F5 again, the page reloads perfectly.

I’ve tried it with Edge and it works without a problem, developer tools or not.

There is no code involved here. As I said, doesn’t matter if it’s a local site I’m creating or any public site like Google, Facebook, you name it. The behaviour is the same.

Does anyone know what’s going on?

Answer 1

You likely have enabled throttling.

This feature can be used to simulate different network situations/environments to test how the webpage reacts to it. It is only active when the Developer Tools are open, which explains why you only experience this issue in that situation.

To fix it, simply select "No throttling" from the throttling dropdown in the Network tab.