Chrome developer tools and request responses

Like most of us, I spent years using Firefox and Firebug for my web development. I love webkit browsers, especially Chrome. They seem to be ahead of both Firefox and IE in terms of HTML5 and CSS3 support. The developer tools in Chrome are almost as good as Firebug, but there was one thing that stopped me from making the switch.In Firebug, the Net tab displays the responses to all requests. Chrome has a similar tab, the Network tab. But, alas, there is no response! It’s a deal killer when you are trying to develop with ajax, web services, etc. So I stopped using Chrome.

Then one day, I headed over to the Chrome Release Channels page. There, you can download either the Dev Channel or the Canary Build. The Dev Channel gets updated once or twice a week, way more often than the major releases. The Dev Channel replaces your current Chrome install. The Canary Builds are released every day. They are as cutting edge as Chrome gets. Google must realize that daily releases are bound to be buggy, because Canary runs in parallel to your current Chrome install. One thing that excites me about these versions of Chrome is that the developer tools include request responses!And if the response is XML, it is nicely color coded and formatted. It doesn’t do any formatting on JSON, though.

Now, I use Chrome for most of my development and debugging needs.