Inspect popup for extensions removed; debug console eating extension form element inputs

Question

To debug extensions, Chrome used to have a "Inspect popup" menu option available when right clicking the extension icon (top right in the browser). I believe this options was recently removed (possibly with the latest Chrome version 20, which I am using) .

The debug console can still be activated by right clicking any element in the extension popup and selecting "Inspect element". The problem I am experiencing however is that whenever I now have the debug console open, typing into form elements in the popup does not work. Even though the form element seems to have the focus (it has a blinking cursor active), all input typed goes straight to the debug console.

Update: It seems focus is not specifically to the debug console, but to whichever window is below. It's like the extension window is a "stay on top" window, without capturing any input.

Update: 2012-07-24: Updated to 22.0.1215.0 (Official Build 147830) dev and the bug is still there. But yay, Youtube full screen now suddenly works on my dual screen system!

Update 2012-05-09: Upgraded from 20.0.1123 to 20.0.1130.1 dev on Linux x64 (Ubuntu 12.04). Problem still there, and makes debugging extensions a lot harder than needs be. Also confirmed behaviour on older Chrome release (20.0.1105.0). Oh well, maybe it's just me...

Update 2012-05-09 2: Assuming this is a bug, consider adding a background page to your popup and log to that page's console instead until bug gets fixed. At least that makes my life easier for now.

Update: 2012-10-19: As omri writes (and points to), the Inspect Popup option is on it's way to be put back into Chrome, which will hopefully solve this problem (finally).

Could anybody confirm/deny this behavior, and/or suggest possible workarounds?

Answer 1

Its going to be re-added to chrome http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143349

Answer 2

Just upgraded to 22.0.1221.1 (Official Build 149058) dev and the problem seems to have been solved, albeit with a workaround. The old way of right clicking in the popup window and selecting "Inspect Element" to start up the console still grabs all input as originally reported.

However, it seems by right clicking the popup icon, the old "Inspect Popup" seems to be back, and when this is used it does not seem to grab input from the open popup window itself.

Answer 3

I am seeing the missing "Inspect Popup" option on right click but, I can edit/enter text in the form fields.

I am wondering if you are having an unrelated problem? If you are using or updating to the new 2.0 Extension Manifest you can encounter issues where inline javascript in the popup fails to fire any longer because of the addition of the content_security_policy defaults. Basically this prevents script injection but also seems to kill all JS in your popup. There are ways around this by changing the way events are handeled in your popup or by changing the default policy. Here's a link to the doc on this: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/contentSecurityPolicy.html

This is just a guess because I don't know what's going on in your code but I saw similar things while upgrading my extension recently.

Answer 4

1. Open the popup
2. Right click the popup window and inspect.

Answer 5

Update: Un-accepting answer as another user confirmed this behaviour for OSX, so at least it will appear as unsolved on the radar, although there's probably a bug tracker somewhere where this needs to be posted.

This bug is still present on google-chrome-beta (Version 20.0.1132.34 beta). I'm guessing that this has to do with window and popup handling on X11 generally, and is obviously not a high priority bug since it's remained this way for quite a few releases. Closing question.