Chrome Now Lets You Make Permanent, Local Changes To The Source Code Of Any Website

Modern browsers such as Firefox and Chrome come with built-in developer tools that let you edit web pages and see changes occur live. Sadly, they disappear as soon as you hit the refresh button — which isn’t a bad thing, but it’d be nice to have the option to have these tweaks persist. Now, with Chrome, you can have them stick around.

These so-called “Overrides” are part of Chrome’s experimental dev tools, so the feature isn’t available by default. To activate it, you’ll need to hit up the following internal URL:

chrome://flags/#enable-devtools-experiments

Enable the highlighted option (“Developer Tools experiments”) and restart Chrome so the changes take effect.

You’ll have to jump through a few more hoops to actually turn on Overrides, as gHacks’ Martin Brinkmann explains:

• Tap on F12 to bring up the Developer Tools interface.
• Tap on F1 in the interface to open the Preferences.
• Switch to the Experiments tab and check “Override requests with workspace project”.
• Visit a web page that you want to make permanent changes on.
• Switch to the Sources panel in the Developer Tools.
• Click on the icon with the two arrows pointing to the left, and select Overrides from the menu.
• Select “setup overrides” and pick a local folder that you want to store the overrides in.
• Accept Chrome’s request to access the folder.

If you’re still having some trouble following how it’s done, this video will show you how Overrides can be used. In this case, it’s to boost the loading speed of fonts:

As you might expect, any persistent changes you make are local to the browser, so you can’t edit the page titles of the entire web to say “ is awesome”. Well, you can, but only you’ll be able to see it.

Set Up Persistence with DevTools Workspaces [Google, via gHacks]