Opera Software Released Opera Dragonfly as an open source project | Hacker News Reader

Opera Software Released Opera Dragonfly as an open source project

my.opera.com

32 pointssverrejoh9 comments

Not being familiar, I had to look this up (the article didn't state, but linked to their wiki).

"Opera Dragonfly is Opera’s debugging toolkit. It consists of tools such as a DOM, CSS and network inspector, JavaScript debugger, error console and command line. Opera Dragonfly is distributed with the Opera desktop browser"...

Dragonfly is a built-in (as usual with Opera) developer tool like Firebug. It is pretty cool! (But often fails to load at all for me)

How does it differ from Firebug with a few other FF addons? I'd be interested in knowing the pro's and con's.

Having used Dragonfly, Firebug and Chrome's internal dev tools a fair bit, I can say the following:

Dragonfly is slow to start up compared to the other two. Also, opening Dragonfly for the first time in a session necessitates a full HTTP hit to reload. Firebug and Chrome don't suffer from that problem.

Firebug and Chrome let you right click on a page to "Inspect Element", which brings the DOM inspection tree right to the right-clicked element. Dragonfly had previously not had this, but they just added it, according to the OP: "One of the biggest usability issues has also been solved, with inspect element being available from the Web page context menu."

Firebug and Chrome let you toggle individual CSS rules. Dragonfly has no such facility [yet].

Firebug and Chrome let you search the DOM using CSS or XPath. In Dragonfly, you can only do a plain text search.

Overall, Firebug and Chrome have that "native UI" feel, but Dragonfly really feels like it's running Javascript.

I still think Dragonfly has a ways to go to catch up to the others, but it's good enough for me to pop it open if I just want to quickly inspect the HTML tree. For more complicated web debugging, I turn to Chrom[ium]. But now that Dragonfly is open source, I'm certainly going to explore the code, and possibly even contribute patches.

Dragonfly is particularly interesting because it uses the "Scope Protocol" (http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/scope-interface/) to access Opera. In other words you can remotely debug a page on a headless machine running Opera. Or, if other browsers implemented the Scope protocol then you could debug them with Dragonfly too.

On the flip-side you could build your own debugger for Opera which used the Scope protocol to access what was happening in the browser.

I think this is something that the industry really needs, to decouple browser debugging, from browser plugins. I'm glad Opera are making this step.

I really hope this is a step they mean to extend through their browsers. Opera have always struck me as the most innovative of the browser developers and I often look to them to see what will be commonplace next.

I have been using dragonfly for a while now and am really happy that it is open source. Its about as powerful as firebug but there are still some needed features that opening it up could bring.

I've been using Opera for years, and I go back and forth between Dragonfly and Firebug. Firefox + Firebug is sooo sloooww. But, Dragonfly isn't quite as full featured.

BTW, Opera 10.5 is really fast. The Beta RC is still crashing quite a bit, but I really like the new features that have been added.

I think this is an excellent move. I used Opera for a long time, but found it to be too buggy so I stopped and DragonFly takes a long time to load and isn't as good as FireFly, so I just stopped using Opera, but I do like it.

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