How to Use Inspect Element in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox

“Your website is the window of your business. Keep it fresh, Keep it exciting.” - Jay Conrad Levinson.

Website design are the best marketing and sales asset that can be running 24x7, which no employee can do!!! As businesses are transforming their outlook towards online marketing. Offering a website that addresses your enterprise or organization’s product or services most creatively and concisely is driving them to understand the competitor’s leading source of digital interaction, i.e. their website!

Inspect element has been one exceptional feature for developers and designers to ace their development game and intellectual progress towards website development. Inspect element benefits the front-end web developers to temporarily edit any webpage without disrupting the backend code, which would perhaps lead to multiple errors. This feature is a saviour for developers in this sense.

Inspect element offers an outstanding way to explore the CSS of a plug-in or your theme. The most effortless use of the Inspect Element tool is to use your mouse to right-click on the element you desire to modify and select “Inspect Element” from the context menu. By default, you’ll typically see the CSS applied to the element, which stylesheet it comes from, and you can edit the styles to test.

Learning how to use your browser’s Element Tool is a powerful ability. It is a priceless learning tool right under your fingertips and always accessible. The Inspect Element features allow the user to understand and analyze the inner workings of the front-end website through mark-ups such as HTML, CSS and sometimes JavaScript.

Uses/ Functionality:

• Examine the Color and Font of the Elements
• Downloading Images and Videos
• Overview of Web Security
• Test a Site on Any Device
• See Hidden Content
• View the Mobile Version of a Website
• Take Screenshots Without Any Extensions

Every web browser comes with an Inspect element tool, no matter what. So let us cut to the chase and dive into “How to use Inspect element in Chrome, Safari and Firefox”.

1. Inspect Element For Chrome

To open the Inspect element, a single Right-click on any aspect of the page and select Inspect. Right-clicking a specific page element will unlock that element in the inspector view, which will provide you with Inspector Box for your page element.

There is an option in the top right corner of the browser window. Click on the three-dot icon, then choose More Tools > Developer Tools.

The Chrome Developer Tools panel will be at the bottom of the browser window. One can modify the panel’s location by clicking the three-dots icon in the top right corner of the panel (next to the X icon), then select your desired dock position. Choosing the Dock to right option— makes it more comfortable to examine the rendered web page along with the source(Personal opinion).

You’ll see tabs at the top of the inspect panel for Elements, Console, Sources, etc. These tools allow users or developers to assess a page’s contents and performance. Regardless, developers can look into the desired element under the Elements tab.

Down the Element tab, you can discover the source HTML of the webpage. You can enable the Cursor option, and the Toggle ToolBar option adjacent to each other on the top-left corner of the inspect element toolbar. Blue demonstrates the contents of an element, green exhibits padding, and orange areas indicate margins.

The Element Select icon also helps locate a part of code from the page element.

Keyboard Shortcuts: Ctrl+Shift+C 0r F12

Steps To Enable the Text Editing Option

1. Find Text content you want to edit in the source code.
2. Right-click the element, then select Edit Text — this opens an inline text input in which you can write whatever you desire.

Hiding Text

Select the element in the source code and delete it.

Add New Page Elements

Open source code, right-click on an element and choose Edit as HTML.

Style Tab enables users with the CSS details applied to an element. Furthermore, one can edit the CSS Code lines by clicking on them by rewriting them or activating/deactivating certain declarations by checking/unchecking the boxes right next to them.

The Toggle Option lets users see the website’s responsiveness across multiple mobile devices and tablets. One can also apply custom resolution size as per their device requirement.

2. Inspect Element For Safari

Regardless, MacOS offers Safari’s inspect tool called Web Inspector.

But users can’t have the same access to inspect tools compared to Chrome. So here in Safari, we first need to enable Safari developer tools.

Steps to Enable Safari Developer Tools :

1. Select Safari
2. Then select Preferences.
3. Inside the preferences window under Advanced, check the box next to “Show Develop menu” in the Menu bar.
4. You’ll notice a Develop option added to the menu overhead.

Next, Go to your Preferred webpage. There you can find three ways to open Web Inspector:

• Right-click any part of the page and select Inspect Element. Right-clicking a typical page element will open that desired element in the inspector view.
• Select the option Develop > Show Web Inspector from the top menu bar.
• Keyboard shortcut: command+option+I.

By Default, Safari’s inspector opens at the bottom of the window.

You can modify this layout by clicking the icon to dock the display on the right side or if you want to pop it out in a separate window — both of which could be found next to the X icon in the top-left corner of the display.

Safari’s inspector panel consists of two columns.

• The source HTML
• The page CSS.

To explore the source HTML & view which lines of code can be in tune with each page, use your cursor (blue resembles the contents, green displays padding, and orange signifies margins)

Like Chrome’s Inspect Element, Safari’s Inspector enables users to edit, hide, and modify elements you can see in real-time view. For example, you can add a new element to the page by right-clicking a line of code from the Source HTML and selecting the Add menu option. To hide an element, you can opt for an option called Toggle Visibility.

Through Style Tab, users can activate/deactivate CSS declarations for any element. Select Develop > Enter Responsive Design Mode to check for mobile responsiveness with commonly used phones.

3. Inspect Element For Firefox

Firefox still covers about 20% of the user base, making it stand out from other Search Engines.

Steps to Enable the Firefox Inspector:

• Right-click offers you multiple options, and choose Inspect (Q). Right-clicking a specific page element will unlock that element in the inspector view.
• Select More Tools > Web Developer > Inspector from the top menu bar.
• Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows) or Command+Option+C (MacOS).

The default view for Firefox Inspector is at the bottom of the window. To adjust the view according to your preferences, select the three-dots icon in the top right corner of the inspector. It will offer you multiple options such as Dock to bottom, Dock to right, Dock to left, Separate Window, Show Split Console, Setting, Documentation and Community.

Firefox’s inspector panel is identical to Chrome’s and Safari’s. The HTML source code displays the corresponding page element with color codes — blue symbolizes content, purple depicts padding, and yellow represents margins.

For Responsive Design Mode, press Ctrl+Shift+M. It is nothing but a mobile preview option to make sure the responsiveness on mobile devices with options such as screen resolutions, toggle connection speed and device pixel ratio.

Click the cursor icon to find code by selecting desired elements.

Select its code in the inspector to change or delete a page element. Then, double-click to modify the text or right-click and select Edit as HTML or Create New Node to add code.

Conclusion:

Here was a quick guide on how to inspect elements in Chrome, Safari and Firefox. As you harness this tool's power, you will realize how much information it would provide you about the website’s front-end working code. You can explore its many features and how it enhances the website’s performance, interaction, and eye-grabbing features.