

Opera Software Released Opera Dragonfly as an open source project - sverrejoh
http://my.opera.com/dragonfly/blog/opera-dragonfly-open-for-business

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PidGin128
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"...

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aw3c2
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)

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

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Pistos2
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.

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sh1mmer
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.

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dirtbox
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.

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CoryMathews
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.

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iamelgringo
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.

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fnid2
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.

