For some reason in the latest versions of Canary (and I reinstalled it a couple times) no longer allows you to change elements in dev tools by clicking on them. The only way I can go through the DOM in the elements tab is with the up and down arrow keys which takes forever.
I can use the magnifying glass to select things, but then can't go further into their children elements without using the arrow key. Clicking on elements does nothing at all.
How to fix?
I was seeing this too... seems devtools can get in a funky state. The solution is to:
open devtools
click the traffic light icon and click Settings
scroll down and click Restore defaults and reload button
This fixed it for me...
I had this issue too. I noticed that although you can't click on the element itself, you can on the white space on the left of it, with the same effect.
Note: I've read similar threads, but none quite my issue - I can right click on it fine, it just then disappears.
I find 'Inspect Element' an invaluable tool in Chrome, however I'm having trouble using it for sub-menu for an element on my nav bar, which pops up below on hover of its parent item.
The popup (or down) isn't quite styled how I'd like, so I right-click > inspect element to see what's coming from where exactly, and get a better idea of how to achieve my desired effect.
However, as soon as I move my mouse away from the menu, it's gone; thus I can't select different elements in the inspection pane, and see which area is highlighted at the same time.
Is there a way around this, without changing the menu, so that it stays 'popped up' once activated?
If the hover element is triggered by JS (if triggered by CSS :hover, see gmo's answer), you can inspect it if you pause script execution. This is a much simpler way of freezing the DOM than the other answers suggest. You can pause script execution without losing the hover element as follows:
1. Via a keyboard shortcut
Here's how you do it in Chrome. I'm sure Firefox has an equivalent procedure:
Open up Developer Tools and go to Sources.
Note the shortcut to pause script execution—F8 (there may also be another depending on your OS).
Interact with the UI to get the element to appear.
Hit F8.
Now you can move your mouse around, inspect the DOM, whatever. The element will stay there.
2. Via a delayed debugger statement
Some web pages attach keydown / keypress / keyup event listeners which interfere with the shortcut above. In those cases, you can pause script execution by triggering a debugger statement while the hover is open:
Open the JS console, and enter:
// Pause script execution in 5 seconds
setTimeout(() => { debugger; }, 5000)
Trigger the hover and wait for the debugger statement to execute.
If the hover effect is given with CSS then yes, I normally use two options to get this:
One, to see the hover effect when the mouse leave the hover area:
Open the inspector in docked window and increase the width until reach your HTML element, then right click and the popup menu must be over the inspector zone... then when you move the mouse over the inspector view, the hover effect keep activated in the document.
Two, to keep the hover effect even if the mouse is not over the HTML element, open the inspector, go to Styles TAB and click in the upper right icon that says Toggle Element State...(dotted rectangle with an arrow) There you can manually activate the Hover Event (among others) with the checkbox provided.
If it's not clear at all, let me know and I can add a few screenshots.
Edited: screenshot added.
And finally and as I say at the begining, I only be able to do this if the hover is set with CSS:HOVER... when you control the hover state with jQuery.onMouseOver for example, only works (sometimes), the method One.
Hope it helps.
What worked for me is selecting the specific a tag I wanted to inspect and configure it to break on attribute modification:
After doing the above, I would again normally select that a tag then the dropdown will automatically stay as-is even when I mouseover to other places like Inspect Element, etc.
You can just refresh the browser when doing inspecting the menu dropdown elements to go back to normal state.
Hope this helps. :)
You can also do this in the javascript console:
$('#foo').trigger('mouseover');
An that will "freeze" the element in the "hover" state.
Here's how I do it with no CSS changes or JS pausing in Chrome (I am on a Mac and do not have a PC in front of me if you are running on Win):
have your developer console open.
do not enable the hover inspection tool yet, but instead open up your desired sub menu by moving your mouse over it.
hit Command+Shift+C (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+C (Win/Linux)
now the hover inspection tool will apply to the elements you have opened in your sub-nav.
Open Inspect element
Now go to elements now on right side and select hover
It will show all hover effects
Not sure if it was present in previous browser revisions, but I just found out this extremely simple method.
Open the inspector in chrome or Firefox, right click on the element you are interested in, and select the appropriate option (in this case: hover).
This will trigger the associated CSS.
Screenshots from Firefox 55 and chromium 61.
I needed to do this, but the element I was trying to inspect was added and removed dynamically based on hover state of another element. My solution is similar to this one, but that didn't quite work for me.
So here's what I did:
Add simple script to enter debugger mode upon mouseover of the element that triggers the hover event you're concerned about.
$(document).on('mouseover', '[your-hover-element-selector]', function(e) {
debugger;
});
Then, with the dev console open in Chrome, hover over your element, and you will enter debugger mode. Navigate over to the sources section of the dev tools, and click the "Resume script execution" button (the blue play-like button below).
Once you do that, your DOM will be paused in the hover state, and you can use the element inspector to inspect all the elements as they exist in that state.
I found a very simple way to do this if for some reason you have problems with script pausing:
Open Dev Tools on "inspect"-tab.Hover to make the pop-up appear.Right-click on the desired element in your pop-up and press 'Q' (in Firefox) to inspect that element.Use keyboard to navigate: Arrow Up/Down: Move between elementsArrow Left/Right: Collapse/ExpandTab/Shift+Tab: Move between inspector and CSS rules and inside CSS RulesEnter: Edit CSS Rule
Excellent stuff!
Thank you to gmo for that advice. I did not know about those attribute settings massively helpful.
As a small revision to the wording I would explain that process as follows:
Right Click on the element you would like to style
Open 'Inspect' tool
On right hand side, navigate to the small Styles tab
Found above CSS stylesheet contents
Select the .hov option - This will give you all the settings
available for the selected HTML element
Click and Change all options to be inactive
Now Select the state that you would like to tweak - On activation of any of these, your Stylesheet will jump you directly to those settings:
Styles - Tweaking Filters - Interactive elements
This information was a lifesaver for me, cannot believe I have just heard about it!
Change the CSS so that the property which hides the menu isn't applied while you work on it is what I do.
I am trying to view, through Chrome's developer tools, how tooltips are structured on a site. However, even when I am hovered over the item, when I "inspect element", nothing shows for the tooltip in the html. I know I can set the Style to :hover, but I still can't see the html or css of the tooltip.
Any ideas?
F8 will pause debugging.
On Mac, you may need to have the 'Sources' tab of the developer tools open.
Mouse over the tooltip, and press F8 while it is displayed.
You can now use the inspector to look at the CSS.
I actually found a trick to do that with the Twitter Bootstrap tooltips. If you open the dev tools (F12) on another monitor, then hover over the element to bring up the tooltip, right click as if you were to select 'Inspect Element'. Leaving that context menu open, move the focus over to the dev tools. The html for the tooltip should show up next to the element its a tooltip for in the HTML. Then you can look at it as if it were another element. If you go back to Chrome the HTML disappears so just something to be aware of.
Kind of a weird way but it worked for me so I figured I would share it.
This solution works without any extra code.
Hit command-option-j to open the console. Click the window-looking button on the top right corner of the console to open the console in a different window.
Then, in the Chrome window, hover over the element that triggers the popover, hit command-` however many times you need to focus on the console, then type debugger. That'll freeze the page, then you can inspect the element in the Elements tab.
Click f12 go to the console tab and add the following:
setTimeout(()=> {debugger},5000)
This will give you 5 seconds to do whatever you want and it will break at 5 seconds. Then you can inspect the target element
(ex. hover the element and wait 5 seconds then inspect..)
You would just need to force the tooltip to show as such
$('.myelement').tooltip('open');
Now the tooltip will show regardless of hovering state.
Scroll down near the bottom of the DOM where you should see the markup.
Update see cneuro's comment for Bootstrap 3.
$('.myelement').tooltip('show');
Update see Marko Grešak's answer for Chrome and apparently Safari as well, $0 can be used as a shortcut for the currently selected element. This appears to work in Safari as well.
$($0).tooltip('show')
Single window answer, with no coding
None of the other answers are quite right, or have enough detail, so here's my attempt.
Open Chrome's DevTools using F12/Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows/Linux) or Command+Option+I (Mac).
Select the Sources tab in the DevTools window.
Using the mouse, hover over the element you want to inspect, to make the tooltip visible.
Press F8 (Windows/Linux/Mac) to pause script execution. The main window will grey out, and a "Paused in debugger" popup will appear.
In the DevTools window, select the Elements tab
For Bootstrap tooltips, the tooltip will appear as the last <div> in the <body>
For me, the accepted answer didn't work: clicking in DevTools immediately closed the ToolTip.
However, I found https://superuser.com/questions/249050/chrome-keyboard-shortcut-to-pause-script-execution which helped me:
In the console:, Run:
const F12 = 123
window.addEventListener('keydown', function(event) {
if (event.keyCode === F12 ) {
debugger;
}
});
Highlight element with inspector
Hit F12
You can now inspect the element, with JavaScript paused so the DOM won't change.
it is so simple to edit these tooltips.
Step 1: Inspect the element that has the tooltip. Make sure it is highlighted with blue in devtools.
Step 2: right-click on the element (in devtools part) and select: attribute modifications, under Break on
Step 3: Hover over the inspected element and a gray overlay will appear over the site with a small text: Paused in debugger
at the top of your screen
Step 4: Click on the blue arrow until the hover state is selected.
Step 5: Inspect and edit the tooltip
No code solution for JS activated tooltips:
With Chrome's devtools inspect the containing / parent element of the tooltip. In the "elements" tab, right click on that container DOM element then choose "break on" > "subtree modifications". The next time you hover over the part of the DOM the tooltip is housed in, the JS code will be paused allowing you to inspect the contents of the tooltip.
Follow these steps
Open Inspect window in chrome.
Place the mouse over the tooltip.
Press F8
JS execution will be paused and then you can inspect the tooltip.
Press F8 again to start execution and F10 to debug.
Here is how I did it on Mac:
Hover over the element that has a tooltip with chrome devtools opened.
Wait for the tooltip to appear.
Open devtools command palette with a keyboard shortcut. Cmd+Shift+P worked for me.
Type in Disable JavaScript and press Enter
This will prevent from fading all the tooltips that utilize JavaScript.
Hover over the element, press F8 for little longer, it will pause script execution.
Here’s a simple solution: If you have dynamic tooltips, you can make them “persistent” by (temporarily) changing the trigger event to click. This will have the effect that the tooltip only disappears on a click-out:
$('body').tooltip({
selector: "[data-toggle='tooltip']",
trigger: "click"
});
This way, it can be easily inspected with FF’s or Chrome’s debugging tools.
1)Open the Inspect window by clicking F12
2)Go to source tab(next to console)
3)Now hover on element to be inspected and keep your mouse over there.
4)Using keyboard(Tab or shift+tab) to move the control to pause button or F8Refer the image
5)When keyboard focus is on Play button. Hit enter. Your hover element will be freezed you can do anything now
just hit one line script in console and press any key to enter in debug mode.
window.onkeydown = () => { debugger }
The dev tools provides a way to inspect a hovered element like a tooltip.
1 - Open the dev tools using F12.
2 - Select "Elements" tab.
3 - Select the parent element that contains the tooltip.
4 - Click on "..." (on the line of the parent element) and after select "Break on"/"subtree modifications" (see image below)
5 - Finally go back to application and make the Tooltip shows up. It should block the execution after the Tooltip gets visible
Hope it can be useful for someone!
appear the hovered item by over mouse
windows --> Ctrl + shift + c || Mac --> Command + Option + C
I had problems with this so I went to the documentation and inspected the tooltip that is already rendered on the page. That helped me see the dom structure of the tooltip and edit it accordingly.
In Chome on Linux this can be achieved for JS generated tooltips such as those for references on WikiPedia by doing the following:
As stated above, open the dev tools using F12. Open them in another window.
Highlight the tooltip and click Ctrl-Shift-C (The HTML Inspector). As you move over the tip, the dev window will show the appropriate section.
If you need to keep the tip open when you mouse off it, to be able to inspect it in the other window more thoroughly, then right click on the tooltip and leave the context menu up, and click on the the dev tools window. In this scenario it leaves the tip up in the wikipedia window.
To a degree it also works with bootstrap tips.
For some reason the answers provided here weren't working for me on Windows. I was able to inspect the tooltip by opening the dev tools, then hovering over the element that brings up the tooltip, then right clicking on that element (not the tooltip). Then, move the cursor over into the inspector panel and scroll down to the bottom. The tooltip element should still be there.
Another Solution I found for this problem. Through Mobile or Tablet view in Chrome
press Crt + Shift + M in Chrome Dev tools for Mobile view in Chrome.
Click(Tap) on ToolTip div and you can inspect it with Right Click on tooltip
Hit command-option-j to open the console. Click the window-looking button on the top right corner of the console to open the console in a different window.
Then, in the Chrome window, hover over the element that triggers the popover, hit command- however many times you need to focus on the console, then type debugger. That'll freeze the page; then you can inspect the element in the Elements tab.
I found a good way I was struggling with this :
• Open Elements Tab
• Inspect an element on the page , should be close to the element that you are trying to inspect
• Hover over the tooltip
• While the dev/Elements tab is open Hit Ctrl F to move the focus to Text area in element tab where it Says Find by string , selector , or Xpath
• use the keyboard key to navigate up/down the elements till you will get to the elements that you are looking for , dont touch your mouse
Land in this post for answers and find eventually a way to do it. Inspect the parent element of tooltip and set break on subtree change and hover your mouse on element and click F8 till the tooltip appear. You can have your tooltip and check the styling.
some tooltips disappeared when we open the inspect part on hover mode, sometimes they don't disappear when change responsive tab (active or inactive button).
then you can right click and get inspect from it.so easily.
Worth noting that toggling the :hover state from within the dev tools only has an impact if the hint text is enabled via CSS :hover rules in the first place. The toggle only applies the hover state to the element for rendering purposes, but does not trigger a corresponding JavaScript mouseover event.
Many frameworks such as AngularJS dynamically attach tooltip HTML to the bottom of the document body via JavaScript when a target element is hovered, so any amount of hovering and inspecting the target element won't help.
#joeyyang's answer worked very well for me in this scenario.
One of the easiest ways I found is:
Open Chrome dev tools on the side
Hover over element
Right-click
Click on dev tools
Now you can inspect and change styles
I don't know what I've switched on (by accident) but every time I have the Inspect Element area open and then try to click anything on the webpage not within the Inspect Element area (especially something jQuery related like a slideshow for example) it greys the page, shows a message saying 'Paused in debugger' and then opens a jQuery file within the Sources section of Inspect Element.
Within the 'Call Stack' area, it shows a message saying 'Paused on a "click" Event Listener'.
I don't remember switching this feature on but I'm keen for it to be switched off.
I know this question has been asked before - I thought I'd found the answer when everyone suggested we look to see if the 'Pause' option is switched on (blue). However, it's not switched on, it's grey not blue or any other colour and when I hover over it, it says "Don't pause on exceptions. Click to Pause on all exceptions".
You might also check the Source tab, check under the Event Listener Breakpoints panel if you've set any breakpoints under 'Mouse'.
This can also cause the issue
Break Point icon at top left should be blue like this(For Deactivate BreakPoints)
Should not grey like this
Found solution here, if the little octagonal stop/pause sign (at lower left of Chrome "Sources") is colored (blue or purple), you need to click on it until it's black again.
It did drive me nuts for a short while.....scroll all the way to the bottom of breakpoint window and you'll find XHR Breakpoints & under it there is the Any XHR checkbox...
Goto the sources tab and check all breakpoints.
Go to Elements tab and remove all breakpoints from right pane under DOM Breakpoints
One possible cause, it that you've enabled the "pause on exceptions" (the little stop-sign shaped icon with the pause (||) symbol with in in the lower left of the window). Try clicking that back to the off/grey state (not red nor blue states) and reload the page.
For me, I resolved it by temporarily disabling the Chrome Bitwarden extension.
You could check to see in the Sources tab in the devtools panel to see what is causing this error, it could be an extension.
To open the devtools panel on Chrome, press the F12 key.
For Visual Studio Users, just go Tools>Options>Debugging and make disabled it