Opera Dragonfly

Following the Release Candidate last week, Opera Dragonfly alpha 2 has now gone live. People using the default URL for Opera Dragonfly will automatically upgraded to this new version. As always, you can access Opera Dragonfly alpha 2 by clicking on Tools -> Advanced -> Developer Tools in Opera 9.5’s menu bar.

Along with the new features, such as CSS editing, that were introduced in the last post on this blog, we've also released schemas and JSDocs for the code structure and source code. This should make it easier for developers to pick up the source code and start playing with it. I'd be interested to see what people can come up with to improve Opera Dragonfly. If you have any questions about the code, want to post some adaptions or give feature requests then head over to our forums.

The next step is to work on the bugs and planned features for alpha 3 in a few months time.

Today we are releasing the ‘Debug Menu’ targeted at all you web developers out there. This menu is meant to complement Opera Dragonfly and provide web developers with a better experience with performing common tasks.

The goal of the debug menu is to bring developer specific functionality already present in the browser in one place, further enhanced with some extra features and reference materials.

Extra features include:

• Open Opera Dragonfly (you might find this easier, instead of going to tools->advanced->developer tools every time you want to open Opera Dragonfly)
  
• Validate HTML5
  
• Validate CSS2.1 and CSS3
  
• Get an Accessibility and Section 508 report.
  
• Check for broken links.
  
• Check how your page will display in Opera Mini
  
• Check the rendering mode of your page
  
• Reload all images (without reloading the page).
  
• Check Alexa rank and Compete.com traffic analysis
  
• Documentation on HTML4.01, CSS2.1, XPath, XSLT and Unicode.
  
• Check WHOIS information
  

How to install
Just click here to download the Menu.

Requirements
It should be used in Opera 9.5. You can download Opera 9.5 from here.

Customize and build on it

Check out the links below on how to make your own .ini file for a custom menu. You can use the same information to edit this .ini file and add/remove/change the settings.

http://operawiki.info/EditingINIFiles
http://operawiki.info/AdvancedToolbarINIGuide

You are not limited by just this Menu. You can download other toolbars, menus and setups as well, that are made by Opera fans.

Have fun with the menu!

Newest Opera Dragonfly Weekly now live
You can download build 08-06-09-15-30. Bug fixing was the major focus of this weekly release, and here is changelog detailing all the fixes.

One of the major changes is that now Opera Dragonfly can remember its state. Attached or detached.

As mentioned in previous posts as well, automatically updated weekly builds can be found at https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly/. Update the URL by going to Opera:Config -> Developer Tools -> Developer Tools URL . This way you can always automatically get the latest updates.

The weekly snapshot of Opera Kestrel included a few fixes to bugs that caused issues in Opera Dragonfly. The most prominent one of these is that persistent cache should now work in Opera Dragonfly, enabling offline mode to work as it was designed. This should make Opera Dragonfly much more useful.

Another bug that has been fixed, and should be coming soon, is that Opera Dragonfly will be useable even when JavaScript is turned off. Once this fix lands, it will be possible to debug how your web page or application works without JavaScript

In further news, we are doing our best to try to squeeze the single windowed docked mode into Opera Dragonfly alpha 2. This hopefully wont delay what we've already planned for the second alpha. It wont be the final solution, as we need to do some interaction design work on how it will work differently to the separate window solution. As there is less space to work with, it will likely be more optimal to have a different view. The initial work will likely just make it work in that view, and test out the functionality given to use from the Desktop team.

In a post alpha 2 release, we hope to redesign and optimise the UI somewhat, and work on keyboard accessibility. The ground work for the later has already began. I've been reading up on WAI-ARIA, and it looks like something we can put to good use. As well as making controls accessible to assistive technology, it should make our keyboard navigation work more like a native application for those controls. There are a number of roles for components that stand out instantly as useful for Opera Dragonfly, including tree, and treeitem for the DOM source code tree, toolbar, button, search and perhaps checkbox for the toolbars, tabpanel for the tabs, breadcrumbs for the DOM path and so on. It looks like ARIA should be something that isn't too difficult to learn or apply.

One of the great things about developing Opera Dragonfly in Web technologies (except being a useful exercise in finding Opera bugs), is that we can design only for the Web standards provided by the Core-2.1/Opera 9.5 platform. Opera has one of the most advanced support for Web standards in the industry, and we don't have to care if they are supported yet in another browser. I'm specifically talking about Web standards here, not vendor only solutions, that will cause lock-in. We can use Opera Dragonfly as a showcase of what is possible with the likes of accessibility on the Web. My next mission is to try to get the team to use SVG images in the interface. With SVG we can make the backgrounds of buttons as a reusable element (styleable through CSS SVG profile), use a CSS sprite to reduce the HTTP traffic, and zip as SVGZ to reduce the file size even further than what SVG would already give you. SVG will also allow the button styles to be programatically changed. An example could be detecting the platform and changing the button shapes or colours accordingly. This is not something we've planned yet, but is certainly something that is possible when we don't have to care about IE.