What is a DevTool?

Web developer tools, also known as DevTools that are meant to help developers in the process of testing as well as debugging their codes. These development tools are utterly different from IDEs and other website builders. It is because these are not meant to help in the direct process of a webpage creation; instead, these are the tools that will help you in testing your webpage or web application.

Web development tools are available as built-in features or add-ons 

These development tools are commonly available as built-in features and add-ons in web browsers. Some of the most well-known web browsers, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer, come up with built-in web development tools as well as many additional add-ons in their respective centers of plugin download to help developers in a more effective way.

Even more, these tools can help the developers to work with a fantastic web technologies variety such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, the Dom, and other components which web browsers are handling. As the demand for doing more is increasing from web browsers, popular browsers are bringing more features geared for web developers.

Key features you need to know 

The web browser’s built-in web developer tools are most commonly accessed by hovering over a specific item on a webpage. You can also access them by selecting the option of inspecting elements or any other similar choice by the context menu that used to appear upon the mouse’s right-click operation. While if you want to move with a keyboard’s shortcut, then pressing F12 can be an alternative option for you to consider.

However, here we have explained some of the most used options in this regard when it comes to crucial development tools features. Make sure to understand each of these options given below to get a better idea about the things in this regard:

HTML and DOM editor 

HTML and DOM editor and viewer are more often included in web development tools. The only difference between these two is that the DOM viewer allows users to see the DOM is rendered along with making changes to both DOM and HTML. You can see the change after the process is done. Besides editing and selecting, the HTML element panel can also display DOM object properties, including CSS properties and display dimensions.

Assets, network and resources information of webpage

Web pages typically require additional content when loading in the form of images font, scripts, and other files. These tools can help developers to inspect the loaded resources available on the website in a three-structure listing. These can let developers explore network users’ information, such as about viewing debug time, HTTP headers being received or sent, and bandwidth usage.

Profiling and auditing to capture more information 

Users can capture information about their webpage performance with profiling. With this information, developers can get to know how to improve their webpages. However, the auditing features will provide developers suggestions by analyzing a page, to increase responsiveness and decrease the load time for optimization.

The timeline feature of browsers can provide a time record required to render pages, events that take place, and memory usage. This feature is essential to optimize your web application.

JavaScript debugging to add more 

JavaScript is the most commonly used technology in browsers. Web development tools offer a user-friendly panel to debug their scripts by adding breakpoints, watch expressions, and pause, view the call stack, step over, step out and step into functions when debugging JavaScript. 

Extensions and plugins support 

Most of the modern web browsers are supporting the extensions and plugins used to add enhanced functionality. These plugins are meant to provide an extensive range of functionality and features with ease.

Web development tools are helping developers in multiple ways. It is better to understand the respective features to understand their objectives. 

List of Free DevTools

There are plenty of great development tools available for free. The list below encompasses more than 500 tools. Please

List of Free DevTools

FAQ

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