Google Chrome Developer Tools (or DevTools) front-end is implemented as an HTML + CSS + JavaScript web application. It uses a serialized message channel in order to communicate with the inspected page. Originally, we were working on establishing this serialized asynchronous interaction in order to bring DevTools front-end out of the inspected page process. But once it was done, we could take it even further and run DevTools front-end outside the browser. Here is how you can give it a try:

• Run the Chrome instance that you will be debugging remotely with the remote debugging command line switch: chrome.exe --remote-debugging-port=9222 --user-data-dir=remote-profile. It is essential that you use a different instance of Chrome for the remote session and that is why we run it with the --user-data-dir argument.
• Navigate to the pages you intend to debug.
• Now run a regular (client) Chrome instance and navigate to http://localhost:9222 there.

You will see a number of links that will bring you to the remote debugging sessions for the corresponding pages. Click them and enjoy debugging your Chrome pages over the wire:

We implemented the remote debugging infrastructure in the WebKit repository (or as we say “upstream”), so that other WebKit port owners could expose remote debugging capabilities with a minimal effort. See more information on remote debugging in our WebKit blog post. For more information on the remote debugging and Chrome Developer Tools in general, see our documentation page.

Posted by Pavel Feldman, Software Engineer