Using The Chrome Developer Tools

Posted 2021-04-28 Anycast

Did you know that you can modify just about any part of a web page live in your browser? What about setting breakpoints that automatically trigger whenever an AJAX call is made, or whenever a specific element on a page is modified? You can do all this and more with the Chrome Developer Tools, and in this course I'll show you how. If you've seen the Chrome Developer Tools, but just not had the time to really dig into them, or you get the feeling that you are only scratching the surface of what the Chrome Developer Tools can do, this course might be exactly what you need to take your web development abilities to the next level. I've found that many web developers are only aware of the basic features of the Chrome Developer Tools, so I've structured this course to go over just about every inch of the tools and explain clearly what they do and how you can use them. In this course we'll cover every one of the 8 panels that exist in the Chrome Developer Tools toolbar. We'll start off by going over the function of the console, giving you the ability to modify javascript objects interactively on the page, debug issues and add helpful log messages with ease. Then, we'll take a trip to the elements panel where we'll be seeing how to modify html and CSS styles and see the effects immediately displayed on the page. After that, we'll check out the network panel and how to find out exactly what resources our pages are getting from the network, how long it is taking to get them, and what order all of this is happening in. Then, we'll head over to the sources panel and unveil the powerful built-in JavaScript debugging capabilities that Chrome has out of the box. (You won't want to miss this part.) We'll follow up with a quick review of the audits panel to see how it can give us some handy optimization tips for our pages. Then we'll dig into the timeline panel where we'll learn how to figure out exactly what is happening when a page is being displayed and how to optimize our pages to ensure the animation is never choppy. Finally, we'll wrap things up by seeing how the profiles panel can help us quickly identify performance problems with JavaScript or CSS selectors and also let us see into the scary realm of JavaScript memory management. If you’ve been waiting for the right time to really dig into the Chrome Developer Tools and see what all they can do, that time has come!