The reason non-standard urls aren't supported is explained by the  issue 9862 , see also  https://crbug.com/664434#c5 

On the other hand, it'd be nice if Chrome allowed chrome-devtools:// scheme. I guess all depends on whether this can be exploited by malware or not.

Marking this as Untriaged and for more inputs on this and for consideration if chrome-devtools:// scheme URLs should be allowed from the CLI or not.

 

Pavel, do you know are there any security concerns about exposing chrome-devtools scheme in CLI?

FWIW, this can sort of be done in macos by using osascript functionality (osascript -e 'tell application "Google Chrome" to open location "chrome-devtools://foo"'), so as far as opening a devtools link sort of automatically, the cat is kind of out of the bag.

It would be pretty great if something similar happened on linux. I'm also sure this request is going to get repeated a lot, since recent versions of node just started adding the experimental debugger feature that's at the heart of this request, so it sure would be nice to pipe the node command into an xargs that launched a browser at the appropriate location. I can do this on mac with the osascript trick, but not on my linux machine). There's also probably a difference between opening the url from a click on an <a> element and from running something via the commandline, but I have no real idea what the malware exposure surface is here.