Why Inspector Lab
Inspector Lab - DevTools is a Chrome extension that brings a full developer-tools window directly onto the page you're working with. It includes an Elements tree, live styles, forced states, a console with evaluation, network requests with headers and response bodies, sources, cookies, and storage. It floats or docks on demand, survives page reloads, and maintains the look and behavior of traditional DevTools so your muscle memory stays intact.
But this raises an obvious question: browsers already ship with DevTools, so why build one as an extension?
The Way We Work Changed
The nature of development has shifted fundamentally. Much code is no longer written by hand—agents and AI systems generate it. The developer's role has evolved from typing to orchestration and supervision: describing what should exist, reviewing what came back, and verifying it actually works.
That verification step still requires real tools. You open the app, inspect the DOM, watch a request fire, check what landed in a cookie. But once your work becomes supervising rather than typing, where you sit stops mattering.
Like many developers today, remote development has become the norm. Code lives on a VPS, agents run there, and you connect from whatever device is in front of you—often an iPad on a couch, in a train, or anywhere else. Remote development from a tablet is no longer a novelty; it's how modern development genuinely happens.
And that's where the tooling breaks down.
The Tablet Browser Has No F12
On a laptop, verifying work is straightforward: open the page, hit F12. On an iPad, there is no F12. iPadOS browsers ship without developer tools, and Apple's restrictions mean you cannot get desktop Chrome's inspector there at all. You can see your app, but you cannot look inside it.
What iPadOS does offer, thanks to one browser in particular, is extension support. Orion by Kagi runs Chrome and Firefox web extensions on iOS and iPadOS. Support is still maturing and not every extension API exists there, but it works, and it's the only option on an iPad.
The solution became clear: if the browser won't provide DevTools but will run an extension, then DevTools should be an extension. Everything Inspector Lab does happens through content scripts and standard extension APIs on the page itself—no debugger protocol, no desktop-only surfaces. If a browser can run the extension, you get an inspector on the device you're actually holding.
The Wider Landscape
Orion is why this project exists, but it's not entirely alone:
- Orion (iOS / iPadOS): Runs Chrome and Firefox extensions natively. The primary target for Inspector Lab outside the desktop.
- Firefox for Android: Has an official add-ons catalog again since late 2023. Requires a Firefox-specific port, but the door is open.
- Microsoft Edge for Android: Ships an extension store, having absorbed extension support from Kiwi Browser when Kiwi was discontinued in early 2025. The catalog is curated and still small.
- Desktop Chrome and every Chromium browser: Works today, and it's surprisingly pleasant even when F12 exists. A movable inspector that lives inside the viewport, remembers its panel per site, and returns after every reload is useful everywhere.
Chrome itself supports no extensions on iPad or Android, which still surprises many people.
What It Is Not
Inspector Lab does not attempt to replace the full DevTools application. Some capabilities genuinely require the debugger protocol: breakpoints, CPU profiles, bypassing a page's Content Security Policy. The feature tour is honest about every boundary.
The goal is different: enabling the twenty inspections you actually perform every day, on any machine that runs a browser extension, two taps from the page you're supervising.
Built by a developer who reviews more code than they write now, for everyone working the same way.