Not a single headline feature - just several moments where DevTools knew the answer but made the developer work to get it.
Status: 🎉 Landed
The CSS specificity breakdown already has its own write-up. These are the other fixes from the same stretch: payloads, storage clearing, XML documents, columns, and flame-chart search.
Binary Request Bodies You Can Actually Inspect
The Network panel's Response tab already knew how to display binary data as Base64, hex, or UTF-8. The Payload tab did not. A binary or compressed request body therefore appeared as something between unreadable and misleading.
The request payload viewer now uses the same decoding switcher as the response viewer. This is a small addition, but it removes the need to copy bytes into a second tool just to answer "what did the page send?"
A Clear Button That Says What It Clears
The Storage panel scattered its storage-type checkboxes and clear action. The options now form one Clear site data flow, with third-party cookies next to Cookies rather than in a separate conceptual corner.
The XML Viewer Without Replacing the Document
Showing an XML tree viewer inside an iframe had an awkward constraint: same-origin callers still expect documentElement to be the original XML root. Replacing the document with viewer HTML would change the page being inspected.
The viewer is rendered in a user-agent shadow tree instead. The browser gets a friendly tree UI while script continues to see the original XML document.
Smaller Things
The Network panel keeps the Request-number column in a predictable first position, and flame-chart search now finds extension-track entries. Neither is exciting in a changelog. Both are obvious the next time you need them.
The Pattern
These changes started with the same observation: the information was already present somewhere in DevTools or the browser, but the interface stopped one step before making it useful.
That is a productive way to find tooling work. Notice the moment you leave the tool - to calculate specificity, decode bytes, reload a page, or inspect raw XML elsewhere - and ask whether the missing step belongs in DevTools.