Dragonfly: Opera Releases Free Developer Tools
Firebug, a web development plug-in for Firefox, has long been a must-have tool for web developers working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But now Opera has released a competing set of developer tools dubbed “Dragonfly.” Very similar to Firebug, Dragonfly offers developers a JavaScript error console and DOM and CSS inspectors, but Dragonfly also adds support for remote debugging.
Although Dragonfly is still an alpha project, the tool will be included in Opera 9.5 beta 2 and newer versions of the Opera browser. To access Dragonfly in the desktop version of Opera just head to Tools >> Advanced >> Developer Tools.
At the moment Firebug is still looking like the more robust tool, but Opera has given Dragonfly a few tricks that make it a very nice addition to any developer’s toolkit — like the remote debugging tools for working with phones and mobile browsers. At the moment that means Opera running on mobile devices, but Opera plans to publish the remote protocol, which means it may be possible to debug other browsers as well.
The other nice feature in Dragonfly is that the document object model updates with changes in a page, making it easier to debug Ajax-heavy pages.
On the downside the alpha is very much an alpha. Selecting Dragonfly from the Tools menu gave me the dreaded Mac beachball for a good 30 secs and interacting with It was a little on the slow side. Dragonfly also lacks some features you’ll find in Firebug (like inline CSS editing, which Opera says is on its roadmap).
Still, despite that fact that it’s a young project, Dragonfly looks promising and, as most developers know, there’s really no such thing as too many debugging tools.
Also worth noting is that while Opera itself is closed source, Dragonfly is open source with the code available under a BSD license.
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