Why XPath does not highlighted the yellow mark in Chrome84?

Question

Why XPath does not highlight the yellow mark? I try to find the XPath at www.google.com

//*[@id="fakebox-input"]

Answer 1

Here the major issue is with DevTools within Google Chrome 84.0 which doesn't highlights the first matched element.

Incase, the locator finds a single match, the search result does show 1 of 1 but the WebElement is not highlighted within the DOM Tree

As an example, the Search Box within the Google Home Page can be identified uniquely using the css-selector:

[name='q']

or using the xpath:

//*[@name='q']

But google-chrome-devtools within Google Chrome 84.0, does finds the element and shows 1 of 1 but the element is not highlighted.

However, if there are multiple element matching to the Locator Strategy, leaving out the first matched element, the other elements are highlighted.

---

Bug in Chrome v84.0.4147.89

This issue was raised in the Platform>DevTools queue through Issue 1108311: The first matched element in the Elements panel is not getting highlighted as per the cssSelector and had been merged into Issue 1103316: Elements search does not resolveNode (highlight text, etc) on first search result where we are actively tracking the issue.

---

Solution

As per @bugdroid the main issue was caused because a check to ensure the search results were valid did not account for the case where the index was 0, so all highlight results of index 0 (index 1 to the user) were no longer highlighted.

The fix for this issue is Merge-Approved in:

• Chrome version 84.0 later then Version 84.0.4147.89.
• Chrome version 85.0.
• Chrome Canary version 86.0.4201.0.

---

Alternate Strategies

You have two(2) other approaches as solutions as follows:

• In the first approach, as per the article Fix site issues with the new Issues tab you can use the command document.querySelector() through the newly added Console tab within the second Drawer from the top to query the element through the css-selector as follows:

• In the other approach, you can click on the Console tab, next to Element tab and execute the either of the following xpath/css commands:

  • xpath command as:

    $x("//*[@name='q']")
    

  • Snapshot of identification:

• css-selectors command as:

  $$("[name='q']")
  

• Snapshot of identification: