Opera has just released the first Public Beta of Opera Dragonfly, their web developer tool. Dragonfly is not the first release of development tools for Opera, Opera has had a few developments tools for some time, but these never got much attention. The release of Dragonfly represents a renewed and hopefully lasting focus on Opera developer tools.
Opera is calling this Dragonfly release an Alpha, but that is wrong. It is public, so it is a Beta. Opera seems to be using the Alpha designation as a way to say "Bad Beta"; "You should expect it to be buggy and even missing some key features, but that is what alpha means." No, that is what Early Beta means...
Dragonfly is not a separate download, but included with the latest Opera build, Opera 9.5 ("Kestrel") Beta 2. Choose Tools | Advanced | Developer Tools to get started.
Its major features are a DOM inspector with CSS support, a JavaScript debugger and a command line console.
Actually, its main feature is support for any Opera browser on any platform, as long as it rendering engine is Presto Core 2.1 or higher.
Sadly, Dragonfly itself seems to have been created in JavaScript. This makes it unnecessarily slow. On the Opera blog, commenter GwenDragon already suggested that Dragonfly is an appropriate name for a fast tool only, and that humble bee [sic] would be a a better name for Opera’s development tools.
The use of JavaScript for the developer tools actually encourages instead of discourages the permanent enabling of JavaScript, which is a serious security risk. It also makes it impossible to use the tools to find out whether a site that still uses some JavaScript works fin with JavaScript turned off. With many sites still using JavaScript, this is limitation so serious that I am tempted to call it a design flaw.
It is not hard to understand why Opera took this approach; no other browser is available on as many platforms. Then again, with all major desktop platforms running on the Intel 80x86 architecture nowadays, just how hard can it be to create a real plug-in for Windows, MacOS X and perhaps OpenBSD or Linux?
Fact remains, that Opera Dragonfly does not fit the "Speed, security and performance matter" slogan Opera is using for Opera 9.5.
Download should not be a problem, but when I downloaded Opera 9.5 Beta from "NL - Netnation", I experienced a slow download (estimated time for 7 MB some 20 minutes) followed by a crash of Firefox 2.0.0.14 (with NoScript, always with NoScript). Firefox offered to resume, but download times like these remind me of the 1200/75 baud modem on top of the bookcase behind me. I killed the Netnation download, restarted the download from "NL - Tiscali FTP" and had the file eight seconds later. Picking the right download host matters.
Opera Dragonfly will be released as Open Source, under a BSD license.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.