What's New In DevTools (Chrome 74)

Kayce Basques

Welcome back! Here's what's new.

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Highlight all nodes affected by CSS property

Hover over a CSS property that affects a node's box model, such as padding or margin, to highlight all nodes affected by that declaration.

Figure 1. Hovering over a margin property highlights the margins of all nodes affected by that declaration

Lighthouse v4 in the Audits panel

The new Tap targets are not sized appropriately audit checks that interactive elements like buttons and links are appropriately large and spaced apart on mobile devices.

The PWA category of a report now uses a badge scoring system.

Figure 3. The new badge scoring system for the PWA category

WebSocket binary message viewer

To view the contents of a binary WebSocket message:

1. Open the Network panel. See Inspect Network Activity to learn the basics of analyzing network activity.

   

   Figure 4. The Network panel

2. Click WS to filter out all resources that aren't WebSocket connections.

   

   Figure 5. After clicking WS only WebSockety connections are shown

3. Click the Name of a WebSocket connection to inspect it.

   

   Figure 6. Inspecting a WebSocket connection

4. Click the Messages tab.

   

   Figure 7. The Messages tab

5. Click one of the Binary Message entries to inspect it.

   

   Figure 8. Inspecting a binary message

Use the dropdown menu at the bottom of the viewer to convert the message into Base64 or UTF-8. Click Copy to clipboard to copy the binary message to your clipboard.

Figure 9. Viewing a binary message as Base64

Capture area screenshot in the Command Menu

Area screenshots let you capture a screenshot of a portion of the viewport. This feature has been around for a while, but the workflow for accessing it was quite hidden. Area screenshots are now available from the Command Menu.

1. Focus DevTools and then press Control+Shift+P or Command+Shift+P (Mac) to open the Command Menu.

   

   Figure 10. The Command Menu

2. Start typing area, select Capture area screenshots, then press Enter.

3. Drag your mouse over the section of the viewport that you want to screenshot.

   

   Figure 11. Selecting the portion of viewport to screenshot

Service worker filters in the Network panel

Type is:service-worker-initiated or is:service-worker-intercepted in the Network panel filter text box to view requests that were caused (initiated) or potentially modified (intercepted) by a service worker.

Figure 12. Filtering by is:service-worker-initiated

Figure 13. Filtering by is:service-worker-intercepted

See Filter resources for more on filtering network logs.

Performance panel updates

Performance recordings now mark up long tasks and First Paint.

Check out Do less main thread work for an example of using the Performance panel to analyze page load performance.

Long tasks in Performance recordings

Performance recordings now show long tasks.

Figure 14. Hovering over a long task in a Performance recording

First Paint in the Timings section

The Timings section of a Performance recording now marks First Paint.

Figure 15. First Paint in the Timings section

New DOM tutorial

Check out Get Started With Viewing And Changing The DOM for a hands-on tour of DOM-related features.

Download the preview channels

Consider using the Chrome Canary, Dev or Beta as your default development browser. These preview channels give you access to the latest DevTools features, test cutting-edge web platform APIs, and find issues on your site before your users do!

Getting in touch with the Chrome DevTools team

Use the following options to discuss the new features and changes in the post, or anything else related to DevTools.

• Submit a suggestion or feedback to us via crbug.com.
• Report a DevTools issue using the More options     > Help > Report a DevTools issues in DevTools.
• Tweet at @ChromeDevTools.
• Leave comments on our What's new in DevTools YouTube videos or DevTools Tips YouTube videos.

What's new in DevTools

A list of everything that has been covered in the What's new in DevTools series.