How can I inspect element on a Chromebook when inspection is disabled? - google-chrome

I am on a Chromebook controlled by an administration that has disabled the usual Chrome inspection. I am also not allowed to take it out of this administrative lock.
Is there a website available that would allow me to inspect element as a part of that website?
Is there some other way for me to be able to access the console log of a page?
I just need to do some debugging of a program, but I can't find out how to tell if there's an error or not since I can't access the console of the page.

No, there is no site or other method available. Usually business and school administration offices disable this on a Chromebook because they give the device to you to use for work, therefore disabling access to certain websites and features. They don't want you to mess around with their devices.
There are 3 solutions to this;
Buy a personal Chromebook.
Confront the administrator about enabling this feature.
Use any Windows or Mac computer, because they allow Inspect Element on desktops for certain reasons.
I hoped this answered your question.

A lot of schools that provide chromebooks or iPads like to put restrictions on them which include:
blocking websites
not allowing certain device features (like playing the dinosaur game when you don't have wifi, inspecting, viewing the source of a webpage, bookmarklets, google assistant, etc.)
and more
I know this from experience, as I am literally answering your question on a school chromebook, since Stack Overflow is luckily not blocked.
There are some ways to fix this.
Reach out to the help desk or IT person at your school/district. Ask them to allow inspecting web pages on your chromebook. However, you must have a legitmate reason for wanting the Inspect feature, like not because its fun how you can edit a website or whatever, but a reason similar to your reason.
I just need to do some debugging of a program, but I can't find out how to tell if there's an error or not since I can't access the console of the page.
I'm pretty sure that the help desk/IT at your school will allow you to have the inspect feature because you have a pretty good reason.
Other ways to inspect the website that you wanna inspect are:
Inspecting the website on a personal chromebook,Mac, Windows, or other type of computer. Restrictions cannot be put on Macs or Windows computers for inspect, so if a school gave out windows computers, the students could use inspect.

Related

Is it possible to hide network traffic from a browsers developer console?

I want to hide a download link from a common user that knows how to use a developer console and look at their network tab. I know they would have other means to detect the traffic but as long as they cannot see evidence of a web request within the dev console I'm satisfied. Is this possible or will every request made within a web page show up? I'm agnostic to any tool that can provide this service.
There's really no way to do this that would be reliable. You can obfuscate all you like, but the DevTools can see everything, and if they couldn't it would be a bug that the browser developers will go fix.
(The idea of using a WebSocket is a fun one, but even websocket frames are visible in DevTools these days).
Stepping back a bit, you should elaborate on what exactly you're trying to do and why you think preventing the use of Developer Tools would be useful. There is likely to be another solution that works better for what you want to achieve.

has chrome eliminated the classic avatar menu?

Like many web developers, I maintain numerous profiles in Google Chrome so as to test web applications. When doing these tests, it is essential to rapidly determine which profile I am in when interacting with Chrome. I depended on the classic Chrome avatar menu to signal the current profile. For months now, Chrome has defaulted to a newer profile menu that only showed the current user's name in text (no avatar image). Until today, it was possible to go back to using the classic avatar menu by navigating to chrome://flags and then disabling Enable New Profile Management System. Now, doing this has no effect. I was wondering if perhaps there is some other way to enable the classic avatar menu so that my web development tests can proceed as before.
This is unfortunately a design decision by Google, and it looks like they're sticking to it. When it initially happened, I (like you) set the flag & was able to use legacy icons, but as of this morning the flag itself has been disabled.
Further reading (follow the links to related issues): https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=512699
I have no idea how much good it will do, but starring the issue and leaving a polite, detailed comment on issue #451920 is a good place to start.

Fusing multiple web servers into one site

Where I work, we use a multitude of various services such as Confluence, JIRA, Bamboo, Mercurial, and various others, that all have a web interface that our engineers can access through the corporate intranet.
However, many in our staff aren't directly network wizzes and having these services spread out confuses them. What I want to do is to set up a central server from which they can branch out and find all other web interfaces that relate to their work.
The first thought i had was to create a light web page with frames, using a top bar where the user can quick-navigate to any of the services available - but this creates an additional problem where i can't email someone a direct link to a page within a service, because it will remove that frame (and confusion will arise again when they see there's no way to navigate by clicks).
Is there some best practice to put this all together? Some hints? ideas?
First, stay far far away from frames. They annoy users something fierce (partially because of that not-able-to-bookmark issue you just spoke of.)
You could create a small webpage that could load within a popup window, which contained dropdown-nav links to all of the various tools. If you had the resources, you could even make it so that users could customize this window - so that they can add bookmarks to the tools they use the most.
But that does bring up the question...I'm guessing your staff isn't savvy enough users to know how to use bookmarks? Or keep going to a central link-repository page? Whatever solution you're thinking of, get input from a sampling of your user base, and find out how they'd actually prefer to work. They're the ones who are going to be using the tools, after all. Keep them involved, solicit their input, do "hallway usability tests" or any tool you end up building might be as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Desktop app/widget development using web technology stack

I want to develop a desktop application/widget, and would love to use a web technology stack. so I can...
Reuse existing skills
Run on multiple platforms (OsX, Windows)
Update application code without having the user upgrade (part/all of the code gets downloaded from the web)
Running in a browser is probably the best option, but one thing that is getting in the way is the browser's chrome (frame, tabs menus etc.) and background, as I want to create a transparent application (e.g. a semi-transparent, round clock that would display on top of other apps).
I'm thinking that a custom version of a browser (chrome or firefox) is probably the answer. All I would need to do is have a shortcut like:
...\chrome.exe -transparent -no_chrome ...\mywidget.html
Seems to me like a fairly obvious need, so before I consider forking chromium, I'm thinking there must be something like this already.
I know there's http://awesomium.com/ ($2,900 license cost), but it is an overkill as I don't need to embed a browser into a desktop app, API and all, and the cost is prohibitively high for a low-cost, limited distribution app.
There is also http://mozillalabs.com/chromeless/ but it doesn't seem actively maintained.
In addition, for both options, the installation overhead is huge (installing a full-fledged browser for the sake of running a widget).
Any suggestions? (please not Adobe Air - I want to use a standard web tech stack)
Take a look at this discussion for several options
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2829126
-FT

Is it possible to make part of the browser transparent to display underlying desktop/windows in a web app? [closed]

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I am developing a web application (meant to run work as a rich client and able to afford requiring any (even nightly build) version of Firefox of Chromium).
The application interface background is meant to be transparent (showing underlying windows or desktop). How can I achieve this? Following standards does not matter but would be nice.
Primary target platform is Linux.
UPDATE addressing comments and answers received to the moment of 2010-07-07T01:44Z.
Technically it's nothing about code interaction and breaking the "sandbox". It's about window composition. I even think it can be implemented pretty easy in a compositive window manager without a browser even knowing of this - just replace some useless colour (for example "fuchsia" was widely used for this during Windows 9x age) with the underlying layer content.
Politically, this can and should be a restrictable function (like local file and webcam access, for example), which can be allowed for trusted intranet applications (local web-tech-based rich client applications seem to be a trend beginning - Firefox and Chromium implement more and more features to facilitate this) and forbidden for unknown 3-rd party websites (but this would require more complex interaction between a browser and a window manager).
The reason why would I like it is that I want to build a cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac), zero-install, fancy-looking rich client application (not meant to be served as an Internet website) with web technologies (like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript). I even will probably seek to use some browser-window-less tech to run it (I've heard about Mozilla Prism and XulRunner, KDE and Windows offer to use HTML for desktop widgets, Chromium is meant to offer something alike, etc.)
This is not possible "currently", but there's no technical reason why a browser couldn't provide a proprietary API for this, using non standard html/css/js.
However, that's what it would take, a browser to actually implement this functionality and then expose it as an API, and even then it would be browser specific.
UPDATE (as some people have perhaps misunderstood my answer???):
I'm giving technical context to the question. Of course noone's ever going to implement this, but I'm saying it's technically possible.
Also, doing this would not break the sandbox model. The browser itself (forget an API for a second) could implement transparency any way it wanted. Once it that it could hook it up to it's Javascript engine, and create a stupid call: Chrome.Element("").WeirdTransparency()
UPDATE to Questioner's Update:
to your point:
The reason why would I like it is that
I want to build a cross-platform
(Linux, Windows, Mac), zero-install,
fancy-looking rich client application
(not meant to be served as an Internet
website)
AIR kinda covers 90% or your requirements. It still needs a small install, but apart from that, you're running...
This is possible in Electron. By setting a transparent background on the body.
I'm sure browser developers would need a lot of "inspiration" - aka $$$ to do this. It's currently not a feature that a whole lot of people are looking for.
Since standard compliance is very high on the priority list for all browser developers, making this out of the box would be a problem. Namely because there is no CSS/HTML support for it, and the standard is to have a white background. This means that they would need a custom "flag" somewhere in the markup to tell it to switch off the white background.
This would be exclusive to the browser that implements the "feature" and anyone else using any other browser would not be privy to the it.
Somehow you can get the background image of the desktop, set it your html background, and code any app in it. when you do this concept with active desktop in desktop configuration, I get to see this. ( I maximize the web page and lock it - to make it feel like my desktop )
For getting the background, I am putting the location of that in my PC right now. But I think there should be some programmatic way to do it.
This works for our local desktops. But the idea you are talking about, you definitely require Prism like thing. But Firefox looks like it stopped that project for all. (I keep the dump of it in my PC, though). So Recent users would not have prism even if you guide them to install it on their PCs.
And then, This works if the image is full sized to fit the desktop. Otherwise, We have to repeat it, and the whole desktop looks absurd. I often try to write AIR ( Adobe RIA platform for the Desktops.) apps for my taste of eyes.
I think you should try learning Adobe AIR. In fact, it supports all open technologies. I am not any Adobe employee though :) in case you think I am promoting AIR.