A tiny Chrome/Chromium extension that fixes an annoying, long-standing Chromium bug: when DevTools is docked (bottom, side, or right) and you reload the inspected page, the page's layout sometimes fails to reflow to the correct viewport size. Content visually slides or gets clipped under the docked panel until something forces an actual window resize.
This extension forces that resize automatically, invisibly, every time the inspected tab navigates - so you never have to manually drag the window or toggle DevTools off and on again to "unstick" the layout.
Install from the Chrome Web Store (the badge above links there too).
Manually, from a release zip
- Download the latest
devtools-resize-fix-vX.Y.Z.zipfrom the Releases page and unzip it somewhere permanent. - Go to
chrome://extensions. - Enable Developer mode (top right).
- Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.
From source
git clone https://github.com/Stanislas-Poisson/devtools-resize-fix.gitThen follow the "Load unpacked" steps above, pointing at the cloned folder.
Open chrome-extension://<extension-id>/options.html directly, or from
the extensions puzzle-piece icon in the toolbar → find DevTools Resize
Fix → right-click → Options, to adjust:
- Enabled - turn the fix off without removing the extension.
- Nudge size (px) - how far the window shrinks and restores. Too small and some systems silently ignore it.
- Restore delay (ms) - time between the shrink and the restore. Too short and the two changes can get coalesced into a no-op.
Screenshot
- Maximized windows flicker through a brief
normal/maximizedcycle instead of the subtler plain nudge (see How it works). - The fix runs on every navigation while DevTools is open, whether DevTools is actually docked or undocked (floating in its own window). When undocked, the nudge is harmless but unnecessary - there is no public Chrome API to detect dock state from an extension.
- Only verified on Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, ...). Not currently packaged for Firefox - the equivalent bug hasn't been confirmed there; open an issue if you can reproduce it.
devtools_page scripts have no console reachable through normal
DevTools inspection, so the extension logs its own operations to
chrome.storage.local instead. Open
chrome-extension://<extension-id>/debug.html (a plain page, no special
DevTools gymnastics needed) to see what it's doing in real time.
Screenshot
How it works
The extension only runs while DevTools is actually open on a tab (via
Chrome's devtools_page API - it is not a background script watching
every tab). On every navigation of the inspected tab, it nudges the
browser window's width by a few pixels and back a short delay later.
That's enough to force Chromium to recompute layout; the nudge itself is
close to imperceptible. Both the nudge size and the delay are
configurable (see Options) - the right values depend a bit
on your OS and machine, since it's ultimately about winning a race
against Chromium's own resize/layout timing.
If the window is maximized, it can't be resized directly, so the
extension pins its bounds and briefly drops it to normal and back
instead of letting it snap through its pre-maximize size - still more
noticeable than the plain nudge on a normal window (see
Limitations).
No host_permissions are requested: the extension never reads or
touches page content on any site, so it works everywhere, and Chrome
doesn't need to warn you about "reading your data on all websites".
Rebuilding the icons
Icons are generated deterministically with Pillow, no external assets:
python3 icons/generate.pyMIT - see LICENSE.
