What you've encountered is something that is more accurately called a
DOM inspector. This used to be a component integrated with Firefox 2, but has since been removed. However, it's still available via the
web developer extension along with a vast plethora of things that are incredibly useful. It's interesting that they included a DOM inspector in Chrome, which mind lend some insight into their target audience. Although, it's still not nearly as powerful as something more fully features (it does let you inspect nodes). The DOM is essential in modern JavaScript to manipulate nodes and therefore page structure and layout. Furthermore, DOM inspectors have a great deal of utility in modern web design since tables for structured layouts have largely been supplanted with divs and associated stylesheets. That's a very interesting find.
Haiku wrote:Though, the nifty part that I saw, was that mousing over any line or series of lines in that source reader will highlight the corresponding element (<-- right there, Thal, I had the disappearing text bug. >_<. I think it's an issue with word wrapping)
I think it is, too, but the problem is that it doesn't always make text disappear. It will also appear to be overwriting an entire sentence until you put the caret at the very end whereby it will sometimes re-render the text correctly only to screw it up again when you click to make a new change. I have heard from a friend that the easiest way to recreate the disappearing text bug is to resize the text area down to such an extent that it is quite small (you can click and drag the lower-right corner of a textarea to give it more or less height). I'm not sure what bearing that has on the entire issue, but it is obnoxious.
The one thing I dislike about Chrome the most is that its stability at this early phase of development is questionable at best. Oftentimes, it'll start chewing apart clock cycles like crazy until it impacts the performance of other applications. I haven't heard anyone else suffer from this issue with any regularity, so it might be due to other factors I'm not well aware of yet.
