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Opera Dragonfly

Bug control, accelerated

Opera Dragonfly alpha 3, update 1

By virtuelvis. Friday, 28. November 2008, 14:46:29

We have a little Friday surprise for you, in the form of an update to Opera Dragonfly. Right after publishing Alpha 3, we pushed an update to the cutting-edge path that we are now pushing to the default path.

The update only contains two changes of note, so we will not provide a full changelog this time:

We've added support for the commands clear() and dir( ) to the command line. The clear() command clears the command line output, and dir() allows you to inspect an object. For instance, dir( window ) inspects the window.object

The second change is the main reason for pushing this update, and it should vastly improve the Opera Dragonfly experience. By encoding all image resources as data:-URIs, loading of Opera Dragonfly should be much faster. This is especially noticeable for first-time users, and for users on slow networks.

If you are wondering how much faster, let us present a purely anecdotal indication: This release announcement is written on a bus trip to rural Norway. The bus company is kind enough to offer an affordable wifi connection. The connection is fairly slow, and has high latency. Yet, first loading of the new Opera Dragonfly in a clean Opera profile is faster on this bus, than loading the old version from within Opera's own network.

We hope you will enjoy this little Friday update of Opera Dragonfly, and the much-improved loading experience. Please let us know what you think of this minor update.

Introducing Opera Dragonfly alpha 3Opera Dragonfly alpha 3, update 2

Comments

shadowk 28. November 2008, 15:52

cool :up:

fearphage 28. November 2008, 16:11

Thanks gents. Nice to know things are still going on. Since it will be an unknown amount of time before alpha 4 (blocked by core 2.2/pergrine/etc), can you please give us some insight as to what to expect or what you are working on in alpha 5+? I see the http logger in alpha 4. Maybe screenshots of it working? Anything really... it has been relatively silent (dead) around here... with the normal pace being a blog post per month.

FataL 28. November 2008, 17:23

I have a couple of questions regadring Dragonfly:
  • How to remotely debug widgets that run on Opera Mobile?
  • Will Dragonfly be faster and more responsive in a future? For now sometimes it's even hard to close it, because of some script that is cycling.

mrmass 28. November 2008, 17:31

This really *is* fast! I didn't even see the loading gif with the new release. Nice work folks!

aleto 28. November 2008, 17:32

How to remotely debug widgets that run on Opera Mobile?


There is not really a difference for Dragonfly between a widget and a normal document. Do have encountered some problems with widgets?

Will Dragonfly be faster and more responsive in a future?


We are trying.

FataL 28. November 2008, 17:45

There is not really a difference for Dragonfly between a widget and a normal document. Do have encountered some problems with widgets?

I can't get connected my widget and desktop version of Opera...
After I enetered "opera:debug" in Opera Mobile, and entered my desktop IP address. After that I actually can see only web pages that I open through Mobile browser. I can't run a widget inside mobile browser (can I?). When I open my widget it simply not appears in dropdown list of remote opened pages...

larskl 28. November 2008, 20:02

as using data-uris adds some overhead due to base64 decoding, how about using 1 big image that has all the stuff an positioning that one instead? that should decrease both traffic and loading times even more

fearphage 30. November 2008, 12:55

I did notice that pages stopped auto-reloading on selection of the tab and you don't have to reload pages for some things to work (like dom inspector). Thanks (ladies? and) gentlemen.

aleto 4. December 2008, 18:26

Thank you, it's fixed.

FataL 4. December 2008, 23:15

Tabs should be styled differently, because right now tabs jumping when you activate them. This happens because you style current tab in bold text, which become wider than it was previously.

Originally posted by changelog from Opera 10 Alpha 1:

Dragonfly now selects the current tab automatically

I don't see it happens.

fearphage 14. December 2008, 23:16

Originally posted by FataL:

I don't see it happens.

Confirmed. First tab is always selected

fearphage 11. January 2009, 03:35

So... the last "weekly" release was December 5th. Is something holding up releases (like core changes/fixes)? Weekly seems like a poor naming decision. The name weekly gives the false sense that at least once per week, a release will materialize. Perhaps you could follow the path of the desktop team and just call them snapshots so they don't inherently imply a schedule.

Could we at least get an update on what is coming? Maybe a road map post? Anything really would be appreciated.

Originally posted by larskl:

as using data-uris adds some overhead due to base64 decoding, how about using 1 big image that has all the stuff an positioning that one instead? that should decrease both traffic and loading times even more

Good idea. You are referring to css sprites.

fearphage 2. February 2009, 18:06

dragonfly weekly has been throwing xml parse errors for days.

Will we have to wait for core 2.3 for another major update? Where is the open source portion? Where are the changelogs? I see updates happen but no post about them, no changelog. I thought this was going to be an open, transparent project. What happened?

Originally posted by url schema for Opera Dragonfly urls:

Each path will also contain a ./logs and ./zips path, e.g. /app/logs, /app/zips and /app/cutting-edge/zips, /app/cutting-edges/logs respectively.

(source) All the logs directory 404. What should be there?

fearphage 3. February 2009, 06:26

I've been seeing the following for days although it appears to be back to normal now.I think it started thursday or friday for me. For what it's worth, i took this screenshot monday (the 2nd).

@aleto: Thanks for all the answers but one thing you didn't respond to was where is the open source, community building part of dragonfly? What is the hold up?

aleto 3. February 2009, 10:47

@fearphage, i have answered the questions which i'm able to answer :smile:

kyleabaker 5. February 2009, 03:41

@aleto
One way to speed up load time would be to optimize/compress the images. I grabbed the latest version and ran the images through PNGGauntlet and it ended up cutting out ~80kb from the images alone. That's a pretty good start for making the developer tools lean while maintaining quality.

Infact, if all of the images were just put together and then just used that way then the overall filesize for images would dramatically decrease and it's only one image to transfer. :wink:

Also, will CSS files be editable in the future without having to find the element that they relate to? similar to how you can just go in and edit the DOM at will? I'm currently very limited with only being about to edit existing style properties and not being about to create completely new ones on the fly.

aleto 5. February 2009, 19:12

@kyleabaker

Thanks for the PNGGauntlet hint, will check it.

I don't really believe in css sprites for our use case. There are close to 100 images. If we would put them all in one file the css would get quickly completely unmaintainable. I hope that we can include at some point the icons in the Opera skin.

FataL 5. February 2009, 19:21

I don't know, why you still use PNG for icons? Opera has decent support for SVG: both as inline image or background for any element (input or button). So why not use SVG? :wink:

kyleabaker 5. February 2009, 21:38

@FataL
If I had to guess then it's probably because they are working towards making Dragonfly function so other's can use it as well and not just in Opera. I read that a while back (trying to find a link). Opera's support may be strong, but a lot of others aren't as compatible.

FataL 5. February 2009, 22:20

@kyleabaker
They proposed others to use Scope protocol, not the client code.
What to use: PNG or SVG for buttons and icons should be defined inside some CSS file anyway... And IMO, this should be pretty easy to change.

fearphage 6. February 2009, 15:03

Here is an example of css sprites as used by google (assuming anyone is confused):
(source: http://www.google.co.uk/images/nav_logo3.png)

EDIT: I even found a sprite generator that you can feed css files.

EDIT2: and even a data uri sprite generator.

fearphage 11. February 2009, 04:23

Originally posted by kyleabaker:

I wish Dragonfly had an open roadmap and a section in the forums to discuss things. Oh well. What features did you request?

(source: http://twitter.com/kyleabaker/statuses/1198031126)

I think he is referring to the fact that the dragonfly forums are effectively hidden AKA not on the forums homepage. Can you talk to the myopera dev create to get you linked near the beta testing forum or something? It just takes one link.

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