Answer : On opening the developer tools, with the developer tools window in focus, press F1 . This will open a settings page. Check the "Auto-open DevTools for popups". This worked for me. UPDATE 2: See this answer . - 2019-11-05 You can also now have it auto-open Developer Tools in Pop-ups if they were open where you opened them from. For example, if you do not have Dev Tools open and you get a popup, it won't open with Dev Tools. But if you Have Dev Tools Open and then you click something, the popup will have Dev-Tools Automatically opened. UPDATE: Time has changed, you can now use --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs as in this answer – Wouter Huysentruit May 18 at 11:08 OP: I played around with the startup string for Chrome on execute, but couldn't get it to persist to new tabs. I also thought about a defined PATH method that you could invoke from prompt. This is possible with the SendKeys command, but again, only on a new instance. And DevTools do...