14 DAY TRIAL // Google has a lot of work ahead of it trying to convince more users to switch to its fledgling web browser Chrome. The browser is definitely a lot more polished and feature-rich than it was a year ago and its user numbers are growing at a healthy pace according to Google. But there is another crowd which the company has to win over, a significantly smaller but very important one, web developers. Without support from the web development community it will be a lot harder for the browser to reach a wider audience so Google is working on giving developers reasons to use Chrome as well by offering a set of Developer Tools, to make their life easier.
“First, our tools benefited from improvements that the WebKit team made to Web Inspector (our developer tools are partially based on Web Inspector). Second, from our end, we recently released the heap profiler and the timeline tab in Google Chrome's Developer Channel,” Pavel Feldman, software engineer, and Anders Sandholm, product manager at Google, write about the updates to the dev tools.
The first new tool, the heap profiler, allows developers to take a 'snapshot' of the JavaScript heap at any point in time. This can be useful for tracking memory usage over time or with different code and should come in handy for the more resource-intensive apps. The heap profiler is now grouped with the CPU profile which does pretty much the same thing for processor usage.
The timeline tool enables developers to see just what components slow down their app or website the most so they can focus more on the parts which need the most work. Google says that the tool keeps track of all events “ranging from loading resources over parsing and executing JavaScript to calculating styles and repainting.” Along with the new features Google also launched a new website dedicated to the tool. It's actually just a page hosted by at the Chromium.org project, but it does a good job at introducing the tool to developers.