What's New In DevTools (Chrome 64)

By Kayce Basques

Technical Writer, Chrome DevTools & Lighthouse

Welcome back! New features coming to DevTools in Chrome 64 include:

• Performance Monitor. View a page's performance in real-time.
• Console Sidebar. Reduce Console noise and focus on the messages that are important to you.
• Group similar Console messages. The Console now groups similar messages together by default.

Read on, or watch the video version of these release notes below.

Note: Check what version of Chrome you're running at chrome://version. If you're running an earlier version, these features won't exist. If you're running a later version, these features may have changed. Chrome auto-updates to a new major version about every 6 weeks.

Performance Monitor

Use the Performance Monitor to get a real-time view of various aspects of a page's load or runtime performance, including:

• CPU usage.
• JavaScript heap size.
• The total number of DOM nodes, JavaScript event listeners, documents, and frames on the page.
• Layouts and style recalculations per second.

If users are reporting that your app feels slow or janky, check the Performance Monitor for clues.

Why load perf matters: BookMyShow achieved an 80% increase in conversions when they built a Progressive Web App that focused on speed. Learn more.

To use the Performance Monitor:

1. Open the Command Menu.

2. Start typing Performance then select Show Performance Monitor.

   Figure 1. The Performance Monitor

3. Click a metric to show or hide it. In Figure 1 the CPU Usage, JS heap size, and JS event listeners charts are shown.

Related features:

• Performance panel. Walk through a critical user journey and record everything that happens on the page, including JavaScript activity, network requests, CPU usage, and much more. Can also be used to analyze load performance. Learn more.
• Audits panel. Run a suite of automated load and runtime performance tests against any URL. Learn more.

If you're just starting out with analyzing performance, the recommended path is to first use the Audits panel, and then investigate further using the Performance panel or Performance monitor.

Console Sidebar

On large sites, the Console can quickly get flooded with irrelevant messages. Use the new Console Sidebar to reduce the noise and focus on the messages that are important to you.

Figure 2. Using the Console Sidebar to show error messages only

The Console Sidebar is hidden by default. Click Show Console Sidebar to show it.

Related features:

• Filter text box. Enter some text and the Console only shows messages that include that text. Also supports regex patterns, negative filters, and URL filters.

Group similar Console messages

The Console now groups similar messages together by default. For example, in Figure 3 there are 27 instances of the message [Violation] Avoid using document.write().

Figure 3. An example of the Console grouping similar messages together

Click on a group to expand it and see each instance of the message.

Figure 4. An example of an expanded group of Console messages

Uncheck the Group Similar checkbox to disable this feature.

Related features:

• You can group your own Console messages with console.group().

Local Overrides

Whoops! We originally scheduled this feature to launch in Chrome 64, but pulled it close to the deadline in order to smooth out some rough edges. Apparently, the What's New UI didn't update in time. Sorry!

This feature is shipping in Chrome 65, which will land approximately 6 weeks after Chrome 64. Check out Local Overrides to learn more. If you're on Windows or Mac, you can try Chrome 65 now by downloading Chrome Canary.

Feedback

The best place to discuss any of the features or changes you see here is the [e-mail] mailing list. You can also tweet us at @ChromeDevTools if you're short on time. If you're sure that you've encountered a bug in DevTools, please open an issue.

Discover DevTools features

Below is a list of everything that's been covered in the What's New In DevTools series.

Chrome 85

• Style editing for CSS-in-JS frameworks
• Lighthouse 6 in the Lighthouse panel
• First Meaningful Paint (FMP) deprecation
• Support for new JavaScript features
• New app shortcut warnings in the Manifest pane
• Service worker respondWith events in the Timing tab
• Consistent display of the Computed pane
• Bytecode offsets for WebAssembly files
• Line-wise copy and cut in Sources Panel
• Console settings updates
• Performance panel updates
• New icons for breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, and logpoints

Chrome 84

• Fix site issues with the new Issues tab
• View accessibility information in the Inspect Mode tooltip
• Performance panel updates
• More accurate promise terminology in the Console
• Styles pane updates
• Deprecation of the Properties pane in the Elements panel
• App shortcuts support in the Manifest pane

Chrome 83

• Emulate vision deficiencies
• Emulate locales
• Cross-Origin Embedder Policy (COEP) debugging
• New icons for breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, and logpoints
• View network requests that set a specific cookie
• Dock to left from the Command Menu
• The Settings option in the Main Menu has moved
• The Audits panel is now the Lighthouse panel
• Delete all Local Overrides in a folder
• Updated Long Tasks UI
• Maskable icon support in the Manifest pane

Chrome 82

Chrome 82 was cancelled.

Chrome 81

• Moto G4 support in Device Mode
• Cookie-related updates
• More accurate web app manifest icons
• Hover over CSS content properties to see unescaped values
• Source map errors in the Console
• Setting for disabling scrolling past the end of a file

Chrome 80

• Support for let and class redeclarations in the Console
• Improved WebAssembly debugging
• Request Initiator Chains in the Initiator tab
• Highlight the selected network request in the Overview
• URL and path columns in the Network panel
• Updated User-Agent strings
• New Audits panel configuration UI
• Per-function or per-block code coverage modes
• Code coverage must now be initiated by a page reload

Chrome 79

• Debug why a cookie was blocked
• View cookie values
• Simulate different prefers-color-scheme and prefers-reduced-motion preferences
• Code coverage updates
• Debug why a network resource was requested
• Console and Sources panels respect indentation preferences again
• New shortcuts for cursor navigation

Chrome 78

• Multi-client support in the Audits panel
• Payment Handler debugging
• Lighthouse 5.2 in the Audits panel
• Largest Contentful Paint in the Performance panel
• File DevTools issues from the Main Menu

Chrome 77

• Copy element styles
• Visualize layout shifts
• Lighthouse 5.1 in the Audits panel
• OS theme syncing
• Keyboard shortcut for opening the Breakpoint Editor
• Prefetch cache in the Network panel
• Private properties when viewing objects
• Notifications and push messages in the Application panel

Chrome 76

• Autocomplete with CSS values
• A new UI for network settings
• WebSocket messages in HAR exports
• HAR import and export buttons
• Real-time memory usage
• Service worker registration port numbers
• Inspect Background Fetch and Background Sync events
• Puppeteer for Firefox

Chrome 75

• Meaningful presets when autocompleting CSS functions
• Clear site data from the Command Menu
• View all IndexedDB databases
• View a resource's uncompressed size on hover
• Inline breakpoints in the Breakpoints pane
• IndexedDB and Cache resource counts
• Setting for disabling the detailed Inspect tooltip
• Setting for toggling tab indentation in the Editor

Chrome 74

• Highlight all nodes affected by CSS property
• Lighthouse v4 in the Audits panel
• WebSocket binary message viewer
• Capture area screenshot in the Command Menu
• Service worker filters in the Network panel
• Performance panel updates
• Long tasks in Performance panel recordings
• First Paint in the Timing section
• Bonus tip: Shortcut for viewing RGB and HSL color codes (video)

Chrome 73

• Logpoints
• Detailed tooltips in Inspect Mode
• Export code coverage data
• Navigate the Console with a keyboard
• AAA contrast ratio line in the Color Picker
• Save custom geolocation overrides
• Code folding
• Frames tab renamed to Messages tab
• Bonus tip: Network panel filtering by property (video)

Chrome 72

• Visualize performance metrics in the Performance panel
• Highlight text nodes in the DOM Tree
• Copy the JS path to a DOM node
• Audits panel updates, including a new audit that detects JS libraries and new keywords for accessing the Audits panel from the Command Menu
• Bonus tip: Use Device Mode to inspect media queries (video)

Chrome 71

• Hover over a Live Expression result to highlight a DOM node
• Store DOM nodes as global variables
• Initiator and priority information now in HAR imports and exports
• Access the Command Menu from the Main Menu
• Picture-in-Picture breakpoints
• Bonus tip: Use monitorEvents() to log a node's fired events in the Console (video)

Chrome 70

• Live Expressions in the Console
• Highlight DOM nodes during Eager Evaluation
• Performance panel optimizations
• More reliable debugging
• Enable network throttling from the Command Menu
• Autocomplete Conditional Breakpoints
• Break on AudioContext events
• Debug Node.js apps with ndb
• Bonus tip: Measure real world user interactions with the User Timing API

Chrome 68

• Eager Evaluation
• Argument hints
• Function autocompletion
• ES2017 keywords
• Lighthouse 3.0 in the Audits panel
• BigInt support
• Adding property paths to the Watch pane
• "Show timestamps" moved to Settings
• Bonus tip: Lesser-known Console methods (video)

Chrome 67

• Search across all network headers
• CSS variable value previews
• Copy as fetch
• New audits, desktop configuration options, and viewing traces
• Stop infinite loops
• User Timing in the Performance tabs
• JavaScript VM instances clearly listed in the Memory panel
• Network tab renamed to Page tab
• Dark theme updates
• Certificate transparency information in the Security panel
• Site isolation features in the Performance panel
• Bonus tip: Layers panel + Animations Inspector (video)

Chrome 66

• Blackboxing in the Network panel
• Auto-adjust zooming in Device Mode
• Pretty-printing in the Preview and Response tabs
• Previewing HTML content in the Preview tab
• Local Overrides support for styles inside of HTML
• Bonus tip: Blackbox framework scripts to make Event Listener Breakpoints more useful

Chrome 65

• Local Overrides
• New accessibility tools
• The Changes tab
• New SEO and performance audits
• Multiple recordings in the Performance panel
• Reliable code stepping with workers in async code
• Bonus tip: Automate DevTools actions with Puppeteer (video)

Chrome 64

• Performance Monitor
• Console Sidebar
• Group similar Console messages
• Bonus tip: Toggle hover pseudo-class (video)

Chrome 63

• Multi-client remote debugging support
• Workspaces 2.0
• 4 new audits
• Simulate push notifications with custom data
• Trigger background sync events with custom tags
• Bonus tip: Event listener breakpoints (video)

Chrome 62

• Top-level await in the Console
• New screenshot workflows
• CSS Grid highlighting
• A new Console API for querying objects
• New Console filters
• HAR imports in the Network panel
• Previewable cache resources
• More predictable cache debugging
• Block-level code coverage

Chrome 61

• Mobile device throttling simulation
• View storage usage
• View when a service worker cached responses
• Enable the FPS meter from the Command Menu
• Set mousewheel behavior to zoom or scroll
• Debugging support for ES6 modules

Chrome 60

• New Audits panel
• 3rd-Party Badges
• A new gesture for Continue To Here
• Step into async
• More informative object previews in the Console
• More informative context selection in the Console
• Real-time updates in the Coverage tab
• Simpler network throttling options
• Async stacks on by default

Chrome 59

• CSS and JS code coverage
• Full-page screenshots
• Block requests
• Step over async await
• Unified Command Menu