Pick an Element

Start picking

Picker crosshair

In the Debug tab, click Edit element style. A crosshair appears over the page, and the element under your cursor lights up.

Just want a screenshot of the element without touching its styles? Capture element is the quicker route.

Click an element

Click the element you want to select it. Its details show up in the side panel.

Move through the DOM tree

DOM tree navigation

Can't quite land on the exact element? No problem — you can move to its parent or child from the current selection. Step up (parent) or down (child) until you hit the right one.

Want to start over? Pick another element lets you begin fresh anytime.

Elements you can't reach

Some elements won't be picked directly — clicking them selects the outer element (the host) instead. Two cases cause this, and both come down to how browsers work, so it's the same in any tool.

• Inside Shadow DOM: components that keep their internals encapsulated — a video player's built-in controls, certain widgets — can't be opened up from the outside. Picking one selects the host element that wraps it.
• ::before and ::after pseudo-elements: these are decorations drawn by CSS, not real DOM elements. Even when one looks like an icon or a tooltip tail, clicking it selects the element that created it.

Styling the host often changes what's inside it too, so try the host first. If the part you want still won't budge, keep the host selected and annotate the before/after images to point at what's actually wrong.

Elements inside iframes

Elements inside an iframe embedded in the page (a frame holding another document) can be selected and edited just like any other. Even when the frame comes from a different origin (cross-origin) — a payment window, an embedded widget — no worries: click an element inside, tweak its styles, and capture it, all the same.

The exception is a frame nested inside another frame, or one locked down by a security policy (sandbox) — its inner elements stay out of reach. In that case a notice appears and the pick is cancelled, so grab that part with Screenshot as an image instead.