King of Web Development and Debugging Tools
Overall Satisfaction with Chrome DevTools
Our entire web development team uses Chrome DevTools on a daily basis. It complements similar tools by other major browsers but is the go-to tool of choice for looking under the front-end hood of a website under development. In the hands of a knowledgeable user, DevTools opens the door to a wealth of helpful information, debugging tools, and even skill-building.
Pros
- Provides clear, easy to understand, and actionable intelligence on how the browser is retrieving, parsing and rendering the page.
- Covers a wide gamut of front-end development tasks, from manipulating CSS rules to line-by-line debugging of JavaScript to helpful page and server insights.
- Continuously incorporates new tools and helpful features. With nearly every major Chrome release there is a "What's new" update with at least one or two useful items.
Cons
- As one delves into DevTools, one encounters a gradually steeper learning curve. You can do a lot very quickly, but to fully utilize DevTools takes time as one explores what it can do.
- With many new updates, tools and items are moved, and a comfortable workflow becomes a frustrating search. This often happens when following only slightly outdated tutorials on a given feature, even in Google's own documentation.
- The experimental flags, settings, and options are scattered about and a little clunky to configure when one has to make changes in multiple places.
- Decreases development time for paid projects.
- Increases customer satisfaction as we are able to deliver quick fixes to reported issues.
- Increases quality of paid projects as we are able to better test sites in a variety of circumstances.
Chrome DevTools is our team's go-to solution for development and debugging, but most major browsers include similar tools. Firefox and Edge include tools that do just about every major item DevTools does, but Chrome's implementation is at least as polished as Firefox's and significantly more user-friendly than Edge's. Chrome is also constantly pushing updates with new helpful features. For instance, a few versions ago Chrome added an optional "Changes" tab that keeps track of all CSS changes made while experimenting on a page. So helpful!
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