The Bug in Google Chrome

Shortly after I finished writing about my first impressions of Google's new browser, Chrome, I discovered a gem of a feature. Chrome has much of the functionality of Firefox's Firebug built into it. This is a great addition, which may make Google Chrome a lot more popular with webmasters than I at first supposed. However, I still think it needs support for extensions before it will become the browser of choice for power users.

In case you don't know, Firebug is a set of web development tools that integrate with Firefox. It lets you inspect, edit and debug CSS and Javascript in a web page. When you're having trouble making some element of a page look how you want, Firebug lets you get straight to the bit of CSS that is causing the problem.

Right-click an element on the page, click "Inspect element" and voila! The screenshot below shows what you get. It should be immediately familiar to Firebug users.

But wait, there's more! Click the Resources button and refresh the page. The inspector then shows you the size and time taken to load each element of a page, so you can see what elements are dragging down the speed of loading.

You can get more information from Google Chrome by typing about:option into the browser address/search bar.

• about:version displays the version number of the software (it's only 0.2 at the moment!)
• about:plugins shows you the installed plugins.
• about:cache lists the contents of the browser cache.
• about:memory shows you the amount of memory being used to display each page opened in a tab. This information can also be displayed in a stay-on-top task manager window accessed under Developer from the main menu.
• about:network gives to some tools to watch what goes on when you open a web page.

Several other options are most likely only going to be useful as debugging aids for Google Chrome's developers, and may disappear when the version reaches a whole number:

• about:dns gives you some statistics about the browser's caching of DNS lookups.
• about:histograms shows some graphed statistics of various things going on in the software.
• about:stats shows even more useless information!

Google has traditionally been helpful towards web developers, providing various online tools to help webmasters and designers improve and track website performance. It is going to be interesting to see the extent to which this attention is carried over into Chrome, the Google web browser.

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