Chrome DevTools JavaScript Debugging Features For Better Productivity
Use these productivity-focused features to boost your JavaScript debugging speed
A software bug refers to an unexpected or incorrect behavior in a software program. As with any other software type, web apps also may contain bugs. A bug in a web app can reduce the quality of the particular web app depending on the bug severity. Some severe software bugs affect the entire web app and break the user interaction flow. Meanwhile, some minor software bugs affect a part of the user flow and may become overridable with alternative flows. The well-known debugging process helps web developers eliminate bugs from their web apps to regain quality.
As fully-featured web developer environments, modern web browsers offer debugging features to detect bugs in JavaScript source codes. For example, Google Chrome gives us the DevTools panel for productive JavaScript debugging. DevTools offers standard breakpoints-based dynamic code analysis and advanced debugging features, such as variable watchers, stack frame analyzers, listener inspectors, etc. DevTools not only lets you debug vanilla JavaScript loaded in the browser — it also motivates you to debug TypeScript, Node.js, Deno, and React Native apps via the Chrome DevTools protocol. Moreover, most frontend frameworks/libraries offer DevTools extensions to improve debugging experience (i.e., React Developer Tools).
Knowing productivity-focused Chrome DevTools features helps you debug JavaScript source codes faster and lets you deliver bug fixes productively. In this story, I’ll explain DevTools features that you can use to boost JavaScript debugging productivity. Practice these DevTools features and focus solely on debugging rather than struggling to find a way to debug!
Watching Variables and Expressions
When a debugger breakpoint halts the code execution, we can inspect each JavaScript variable by hovering the mouse. We can use this technique to inspect atomic values and objects during debugging, but this process becomes a time-consuming task if you need to watch several variables at once. It becomes even more challenging if you need to evaluate expressions with variables that you need to watch…