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Opera Dragonfly

Bug control, accelerated

The latest weekly, now with more lingo

By David Storey. Thursday, 21. August 2008, 16:29:36

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We’ve just put the latest build of Opera Dragonfly on the weekly branch. New for this release is the infrastructure for localisation. We have plans to release Opera Dragonfly in a number of languages, and this release is focused on testing the infrastructure we’ve put in place. It is supplied with test localisations in Japanese and German. These localisations are examples and not the finalised text for those languages. Opera Dragonfly will load the required language file, depending on the language of your browser.

After this release we are focusing on testing the features added to the new version of the Scope protocol, which will be included in Core-2.2. We need to make sure these work and there are no major bugs before Core-2.2 goes into code freeze. As such there will be no weeklies for a while, until that work has been carried out. After this we can start working on the rest of the features planned for alpha 3, including DOM editing.

The next version of Scope should improve the user experience considerably as Opera Dragonfly will be able to detect the currently focused tab or window, which means there will be less steps to start up. We hope to also allow the user to select an element n the page and have Opera Dragonfly go straight to that element in the DOM inspector. We will also have the basics of the HTTP inspector.

Opera Dragonfly alpha 2 out nowIntroducing Opera Dragonfly alpha 3

Comments

remcolanting 21. August 2008, 16:35

Cool, a new Core version coming up. Also, "weekly" is far from the truth. It would be better to call it a snapshot, which it is :smile:

dstorey 21. August 2008, 16:41

Well it was a weekly (more or less), but then holidays and now major testing got in the way. There will be more closer to weeklies in the future.

dAEk 21. August 2008, 20:10

Sounds great. :smile:

Thanks for keeping us posted.

zyph 21. August 2008, 20:10

Excellent work! I'm looking forward to the day where I can uninstall Firebug, and solely rely on Dragonfly for debugging.

coltcha 22. August 2008, 07:53

"The next version of Scope should improve the user experience considerably as Opera Dragonfly will be able to detect the currently focused tab or window, which means there will be less steps to start up."

lots of users waiting this feature !!

zibin 22. August 2008, 13:52

Good one! :smile:

fearphage 22. August 2008, 13:56

I wonder if that means the window will be bound to each tab instead of to the Opera window.

keiki 22. August 2008, 16:43

What a cool the Japanese version of Dragonfly!
We were really looking forward having that! GJ :cheers:

ThiagoHP 23. August 2008, 22:28

Tip: don't try to write a single localization for both Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. They're the same language but, when it comes to computer-related vocabulary, they're very different. Brazilians tend to not translate most computer-related words (mouse, driver), while the Portuguese do (rato, controlador de dispositivo).

dstorey 24. August 2008, 13:26

Thanks for the tip Thiango. We’ve got both a Brazilian and a Portuguese close by where I sit, so we should be able to validate in our localisations are correct.

fearphage 28. August 2008, 18:00

I find the auto-reload functinoality when you open dragonfly to be harmful. Loosing form data or other information arbitrarily. How does dragfonfly choose the default tab (the tab to reload)? Is there an option to disable this for now? This would be another reason to have a config option to always have it enabled.

MisterE 31. August 2008, 18:57

May I ask why is the development of Dragonfly taking this long?
I mean, IE8 beta's developer tools already allows you to alter the DOM/CSS.

Don't mean to be rude, but why is something that should have been finished years ago taking this long?

I think a big part or Firefox's success is due to Firebug. Firebug exists => devs fix their sites to work with Firefox. Not just that, but Firebug was so good that new sites started being developed to work with Firefox FIRST and then fix them for IE (before going public, of course). I'm a web applications developer and I know I did it this way.

Not a Firefox fanboy here. Opera is (and will remain) my main browser.
I'm just a little disappointed.

I think Opera should invest more resources into Dragonfly...

GoJoeGo 3. September 2008, 11:33

Gee, let me guess, maybe Opera doesn't have the hundreds of thousand developers Microsoft can throw at things?

Also, "should have been finished years ago" is a completely retarded thing to say. It can't be finished before it's even started.

MisterE 3. September 2008, 18:50

Sorry for posting off-topic again, but I had to say this.
Working on developer tools has started at least a year ago. If A SINGLE developer was working full time, we would have had a finished Dragonfly some time ago.

That being said, I DO appreciate that Opera gives us tools. And I believe them when they say they will be better than Firebug.

As a loyal user I'm just sad that Opera already lost a lot of market share by not giving them on time.

P.S.: The just released Google Chrome beta has an inspector which you can use to modify the DOM tree...

dstorey 3. September 2008, 22:30

Google Chrome doesn't have its own developer tool. It is the WebKit tool (as they both use the same engine), which was started quite a while before Opera Dragonfly, and of course Apple has quite a lot more resources and many developers that write developer tools for a living as their primary job (they have XCode and all the other tools for OS X development for example).

Its unfair to say a single developer working full time would have finished it a long time ago. The tool has to be built from the ground up including the module (Scope) which Dragonfly interacts with to get the information it needs. We are building these in parallel. When Firebug was created they already had the ground work laid by Venkman and friends, plus the UI frameworks like XUL.

We are making progress, and like I said in the post above, we will see quite a few improvements when a browser is released with the next Scope module. We'll hopefully get another alpha release on the Core-2.1 branch that will include improvements that we don't need scope for, like DOM editing.

shoust 5. September 2008, 18:32

Will we need to wait until Peregrine for the next dragonfly to be fully functional though? Will 9.6 have the next scope module in?

fordster 9. September 2008, 16:20

The url for the 'weekly branch' above (http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly/) is showing as an error page.

dstorey 10. September 2008, 09:45

It is working for me fordster? Are you sure you entered it correctly in the opera"config page?

ph. 14. September 2008, 10:35

@fordster:
This is in the top of the /weekly/ page:

if( navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Macintosh') != -1 && Number(opera.buildNumber()) <= 4789 )
{
location.href = "https://dragonfly.opera.com/error.html";
}

@dstorey:
I really wish you would make ⌥⌘I toggle dragonfly instead of just opening it. This is something that annoys me a lot, as I tend to enable and disable DragonFly often.

fearphage 14. September 2008, 17:05

@ph.: why don't you change the shortcut to make it do that yourself? Edit the shortcut to be the following:
Attach Developer Tools Window | Close Developer Tools Window
save it and you are done.

ph. 17. September 2008, 06:38

@fearphage:
Because I didn't know I could, but now I do :smile:
Thank you!

fearphage 17. September 2008, 12:02

@ph.: Fantastic! :cheers: Glad I could be of service.

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