Google Chrome Devtools broken when inspecting Android Webview

Question

This worked well and the problem started happenning about two weeks ago.

I run a Chrome on a Windows 10 computer. I have already tried uninstalling, and then reinstalling Chrome since the issue started. No change.

This is what happens:

1) I start Android emulator 2) Run my cordova app in it 3) Go to chrome://inspect and click on the link for my running app on emulator. It is listed ok, that works. 4) The DevTools window opens, but it does not show all the information as it did. I see half of the screen blank. The menu tabs sometimes don't show, I have to minimize, then maximize, then they MAY show. There are no scrollbars for any of the content panels so I cannot actually see anything useful.

I tried clicking on the gear icon in the top right of the screen, to open Settings, and see if changing something there would fix it. Nothing. The settings window opens but it will ONLY show the links on the left to the settings areas. The right side where the settings controls should be, is completely blank.

I have created a new emulator and the same happened.

I have Android Studio 3.0.1

I tried inspecting the devtools with shift-ctrl-j

It is showing some strange errors. As if it was loading an older version of itself:

Please help, I need to use this to debug my cordova app during development and I don't know what else to do. Thank you.

Answer 1

Check out: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-chrome-developer-tools/s47cbyLKvxA

I haven't digested the thread fully, but I think it's due to a deprecation in Chrome that is outside of the DevTools team's control.

Please let us know if this is indeed the same issue that you're seeing.

Answer 2

As explained in Kayce Basques's answer, this is due to a problem with versions of Chrome since 63.

The solution is to use an older version of Chromium.

Here are the download links for the the latest version of Chromium (version 62.0.3202.94, branch base position 499098) which support it:

• macOS: https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/chromium-browser-snapshots/o/Mac%2F499098%2Fchrome-mac.zip?generation=1504230238091965&alt=media
• Windows 64 bits: https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/chromium-browser-snapshots/o/Win_x64%2F499095%2Fchrome-win32.zip?generation=1504230103809077&alt=media

Feel free to edit this post to add the links for other platforms.