The Chrome debugging protocol allows for tools to instrument, inspect, debug and profile Chromium, Chrome and other Blink-based browsers. Many existing projects currently use the protocol. The Chrome DevTools uses this protocol and the team maintains its API.

Instrumentation is divided into a number of domains (DOM, Debugger, Network etc.). Each domain defines a number of commands it supports and events it generates. Both commands and events are serialized JSON objects of a fixed structure. You can either debug over the wire using the raw messages as they are described in the corresponding domain documentation, or use extension JavaScript API.

The 1.1 version of the protocol is the latest stable release of the protocol, tagged at Chrome 31. It includes a smaller subset of the complete protocol compatibilities.

The latest (tip-of-tree) protocol changes frequently and may break at any time. However it captures the full capabilities of the Protocol, whereas the stable release is a subset. There is no backwards compatibility support guaranteed for the capabilities it introduces.

This site also features the v8-inspector protocol, which is available in PR #6792 for Node.js.