Disable automatic saving of CSS changes in Chrome Developer Tools

While not solving the issue directly, it is a decent work around:

In Chrome, in the css inspector you can click and hold the + button, then choose to add your changes to the inspector-stylesheet. It's not as convenient as directly editing in your css-selectors, but what you write will all be in inspector-stylesheet.css, so not saved to your project. Then when you are happy with your changes, you can manually put them in to your css.

Alas, I learned after reading a post by Google's dev relations person that the automatic save cannot be disabled and it seems that's the way it's going to stay. html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/revolutions2013

– tommypyatt Feb 21 '14 at 14:22

I am having the same problem, I can only offer workarounds: use another browser, such as Firefox, for doing tests!

Alternatively you could launch another instance of Chrome with a different profile. You could also launch a Chrome "Incognito Window", it seems to not apply the filesystem mappings.

I normally use an Incognito Window or inline styles to test changes.