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Automatically open Chrome DevTools in each new tab

May 3, 2020

Tip: You can automatically open Chrome DevTools in each new tab! Just pass the --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs flag to Chrome. You can see a preview of this in action below.

On Mac, pass the --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs flag to Chrome via your terminal. e.g:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs https://web.dev

I personally use this flag with Chrome Canary:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome\ Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome\ Canary --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs https://web.dev

On Windows, right-click the Chrome shortcut > properties and add the flag at the end of the Target line. Alternatively, run the following from your command-line:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" -auto-open-devtools-for-tabs

That's it! The auto-open-devtools-for-tabs flag is meant to be used by developers to avoid interacting with DevTools to open them. I find it a huge time-saver and maybe you will too.