Deprecation

As of August 20, 2013, this library no longer works in the latest stable build Google Chrome, due to a change to chrome.profiles. So it is now deprecated. We may try bring this library back as a Chrome Extension. Progress has already been made. – Adam

Chrome Inspector Detector

Demo

A simple utility for detecting whether or not the Chrome Inspector is open or docked.

Simply call chrome.inspector.detector() and you will be returned one of the following three objects:

• When the inspector is opened and docked: { opened: true, docked: true }
• When the inspector is opened and in a separate window: { opened: true, docked: false }
• When the inspector is closed: { opened: false, docked: false }

You can also set up a watcher to watch for changes to the inspector state:

chrome.inspector.detector.watch(function(status){
    document.body.style.background = status.open ? 'red' : '';
});

Example on jsFiddle

Note: In order for docking detection to work, you must have html, body { height: 100%; width: 100% } in your CSS (or something similar) such that when the Inspector is closed document.height === document.body.clientHeight is true.

Things you could do with this that are not malicious :P

• You're developing a JS game and you want to pause the game whenever you open the console so that it's easier to adjust CSS without it constantly re-rerendering.
• You're designing a site and want to display a typography grid overlay whenever inspecting to aid in design.
• You want a few dom nodes or JS objects to be console.log'd whenever you open the console for up-to-date information.

Credit goes to this Stackoverflow answer for the profiler technique.