Google Chrome offers a powerful integrated environment for debugging, optimizing and understanding web pages with its Developer Tools features. Chrome Developer Tools are on the way to become a better browser-based debugging tool than the Firebug and Opera’s Dragonfly.

Recently, Chrome team has added a new set of experimental APIs for developer tools. Developers can use these APIs to extend developer tools interface and capabilities. These APIs enables extension authors to create extensions to add new panels and sidebar section panes, retrieve network requests data, evaluate scripts on the page being inspected, and add custom audit rules for developer tools.

As the new dev tools APIs are currently marked as experimental, users and developers can’t use it with the stable channel of Chrome. Dev channel users need to enable experimental extension APIs settings by visiting chrome://flags page.

Along with these APIs for dev tools, Chrome team has also added new APIs for download extensions and extension settings. The extension settings APIs specify settings for installed extensions which will then be synchronized to the user’s Google Account similar to other items like bookmarks, omnibox history etc.