How to detect Chrome Inspect Element is running or not?

Question

Is there any way to detect whether the Chrome Inspect Element window is running?

For example if the user clicks "Inspect Element" in Chrome, the window shows a Hello World alert.

Is that possible?

Solution 1

window.onresize = function(){
 if((window.outerHeight-window.innerHeight)>100)
   alert('hello');
}

In action: http://jsbin.com/ediquk/

Note that it seems like the resize event gets fired twice, so you should check whether you alerted the use already.

Solution 2

UPDATE This no longer works. The property console.profiles has been removed in Chrome 29.

The only solution that's left is checking the difference between window.outerHeight and window.innerHeight as suggested by @Gerben. There is a library devtools-detect based on this method which adds devtoolschange to the window object.

Alternatively, there is an effort in progress to create a Chrome extension using a more robust detection method, see this Google Group.

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Here's how they check if DevTools are open in the first challenge of Discover DevTools interactive course:

function () {
    console.profile(); 
    console.profileEnd(); 
    if(console.clear) { console.clear() };
    return console.profiles.length > 0;
}