Opera Dragonfly

Introducing Opera Dragonfly alpha 3

By David Storey. Thursday, 30. October 2008, 15:54:48

DOM, alpha 3, developer tools, Opera Dragonfly

We’ve got a couple of announcments related to Opera Dragonfly today. The first piece of news is that Opera Dragonfly alpha 3 has just been released. The main focus of this release has been fixing reported bugs, to make the user experience more pleasant. We’ve also added localisation support—which was introduced in the previous weekly release. The German translation is ready, and we are working on other locales, that will be pushed live as they are completed and QA'd. We hope this will make Opera Dragonfly more useful in the none-English speaking world. Obviously markets where Opera is more popular have high priority, such as Russian and Indonesian.

One of the key new features of Opera Dragonfly alpha 3 is DOM editing support. There is two modes. The first mode allows you to edit, add and delete attributes and text nodes in real time. You can activate this by double clicking on a attribute, value or text node. The second mode allows you to do free form editing, such as adding new DOM node. You can activate this by double clicking on the opening or closing tag of a element. This will turn the entire element and its children into a free form text field. There is currently a known issue with the first mode, where focus doesn't leave the editing mode when pressing the enter/return key. This will be silently updated as soon as it is fixed.

The other main new feature is that the breadcrumb trail has been updated. Now each node acts like a button, so you can navigate the element hierarchy more easily.

The next release will be Opera Dragonfly alpha 4, which is under heavy development. This has been under development at the same time as alpha 3, as it requires new features found in the Scope module that is part of the upcoming Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine. It will refine the user experience some what, as the currently active tab will be detected. This will tidy up the layout and make the docked mode much more logical to navigate. It will also introduce a HTTP inspector.

The way experimental releases are handled has also changed. Now instead of switching to the path for weekly releases, Opera Dragonfly will detect if you are on a stable release version of Opera or a pre-released version, such as an alpha, beta, or weekly release. If you are using a stable release it will use the latest official release of Opera Dragonfly (currently alpha 3). If you are using a pre-released version of Opera it will automatically updated to the latest experimental version of Opera Dragonfly. It is possible to force the use of a stable or experimental version. This is explained in the URL Schema document.

In further Opera Dragonfly news, we now have a person who is focusing on Project Management for Opera Dragonfly. I’ve been handling Product Management, but the Project Manager role has been vacant. The new Project Manager is Arve Bersvendsen, whom many of you may know already. He will bring a great deal of experience and knowledge into the project. I’ll let him introduce himself further in this blog when we have some more news to tell. For now, have fun playing with the latest release.

The latest weekly, now with more lingoOpera Dragonfly alpha 3, update 1

Comments

DjiXas # 30. October 2008, 16:51

Congrats on alpha 3

fearphage # 30. October 2008, 16:56

Thanks for a status update!

There is currently a known issue with the first mode, where focus doesn't leave the editing mode when pressing the enter/return key.

I also expect that tabbing will jump from the attribute to the value as well as escape to discard my changes. Should I file those?

dstorey # 30. October 2008, 17:08

Fearphage: I'll have to check with the Keyboard spec to confirm, but that would make sense, yes.

Chas4 # 30. October 2008, 17:59

Thanks for the update

andresruiz # 30. October 2008, 18:09

Thanks a lot
How do I know if I'm using the latest version of dragonfly?

Chas4 # 30. October 2008, 18:14

When you open Dragonfly you click on the Enviroment tab

FataL # 30. October 2008, 18:31

Arve Bersvendsen

Thanks for update!

xmenclassic # 30. October 2008, 19:47

Can i download the release Alpha 3 as zip file?

The url http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly/zips/ is not existing!?

d.i.z. # 30. October 2008, 20:39

Great update. That is what I was missing.

xmenclassic: see URL Schema. You probably want to look here http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/zips

xmenclassic # 30. October 2008, 21:06

@d.i.z.: Oh, thanks. :-)

malsumis # 30. October 2008, 23:36

presto 2.2? Does this mean that 9.7 is around the corner?

dstorey # 31. October 2008, 00:24

Maksumis: Presto 2.2 may or probably may not be 9.7

cheshrkat # 31. October 2008, 00:27

Inline CSS debugging is awesome. Looking forward to the UI cleanup, Dragonfly really seems to be coming together...

andresruiz # 31. October 2008, 04:48

@Chas4
Thanks a lot, when I click on the Enviroment tab I get:
Opera Dragonfly Version: 0.7 alpha-3-snapshot, so I think is ok.

serious # 31. October 2008, 07:12

way, sounds like great news. just had a look at the dom editing stuff (never used dev tools before

) and I must say I'm awestruck. the alpha 4 announcement also sounds great, can't wait to try it (and presto 2.2 for that matter).

MisterE # 31. October 2008, 10:10

Will Dragonfly have right-click menus? Like, right-click an element -> add attribute?
It's very intuitive, Firebug has it and I think it's a good ideea to build upon the existing knowledge that people have about using dev tools.

I realize that might mean support for context menu in the core, but we should have that anyway because we're starting to lag behind when it comes to AJAX apps.

(of course we should still be able to disable the right-click support to get over those nasty sites that disable it for no good reason)

Do you want me to file a bug report about this?

AOTEAROAnz # 31. October 2008, 12:09

!!!

JanGen # 31. October 2008, 16:39

Great update.
Dragonfly is growing to a awesome dev tool!

zibin # 3. November 2008, 13:20

Opera Dragonfly is coming of age!

abiwan # 4. November 2008, 08:01

I searched for opera presto 2.2 and look what I found:

http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/details/216749/index.html

Great news, can't wait for Opera 9.7. I'm curious if rounded corners will make it to presto 2.2

paziek # 18. December 2008, 21:24

Eh, its been this long, and Dragonfly is still far from being any competition to Firebug.
I know this was said n-times, but can't you just integrate it into browser a 'bit' more?
I mean.. Dragonfly team works at opera, Browser team works at opera.. can't you tell 'browser folks' that you need 'this and that' to improve Dragonfly?
I mean.. just that stuff from Firebug 1.0 would be enough. Context menu with "Inspect this element", realtime javascript debugger (no need to bring up Dragonfly bar and select site, with causes its reload - just some icon on status bar), some better CSS/DOM editor, and properties of objects. And of course some decent network monitor - not this crap.

Right now I still use error console (with sucks a LOT) for figuring out Opera quirks, and use Firebug for main development, Dragonfly is for.. for what? For nothing.
How hard that can be? You have Opera source code - work with it, please. Right now it looks like some widget and it works like some widget.

GoJoeGo # 19. December 2008, 16:08

@paziek: stop whining. Dragonfly just got HTTP inspection and DOM editing. You want them to do it properly, or sloppily like Firebug (which is several years old by now anyway)?

Just... stop whining. Ever heard about "constructive feedback"? Apparently not.

fearphage # 19. December 2008, 16:42

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Ever heard about "constructive feedback"?

We can't all talk about how glorious and wonderful dragonfly is. Opera waited for a long time to get into the dev tools game and now they are way behind. It is far past time to play catch up. Dragonfly has a lot of ground to make up and i hope it doesn't take as long as it did for firebug.

@GoJoeGo: Do you regularly use firebug? I've caught making accusations with nothing to base it on before. Is this another time? What is done sloppily in firebug? Perhaps your criticism of firebug can make sure they don't make the same mistake in firebug.

@paziek: Although I don't agree with you 100%, you raise a lot of good points but the tone is a little harsh. Dragonfly is way behind; i agree. I'm not sure dragonfly will become native. I think it was purposely made non-native for cross-platform purposes (think mobile). Also the code from firebug will be of little use to dragonfly in most cases. They are working from completely different code bases.

But while we are on the topic, the interface is huge and bulky. I use firebug covering about 1/3 of the screen daily. I have to detach dragonfly just to have enough room to see webpages and debug at the same time. ALthough faster with data URIs, i still have to wait for things to happen/load/display in dragonfly (lag). Things don't happen instaneously like i expect from native applications. There are lots of little issues with dragonfly that alone would be fine. But the 10s of little issues add up quickly to make an unpleasant experience overall.

Where is the open source part of dragonfly you spoke about in the beginning of the project? What are you waiting for to set that up? The sooner that is in place we can more effectively and constructively assist with improving the tool. Now there are a few addons and hacks spread around in blog posts. Perhaps everyone could benefit from those if they were in one place.

FataL # 19. December 2008, 18:53

I think it was purposely made non-native for cross-platform purposes (think mobile).

I disagree. There is no sense to do JavaScript widget just for compatibility with oter devices. Think: will Dragonfly run on mobile? No. Mainly because of small screen space. Instead Opera created special protocol for remote debugging, which is great but still lacking some features like remote widgets debugging. So all remote debugging you will do on desktop version...
IMO Opera created not native solution because of lack of resources and time to create native GUI tool. That's my vision...
Personally I still use 9.27 developer tools for DOM debugging (90% of overall debugging time). For CSS and JavaScript debugging I use 9.6 with Dragonfly.

GoJoeGo # 22. December 2008, 22:44

Originally posted by fearphage:

We can't all talk about how glorious and wonderful dragonfly is.

Uh, that's not the point. Why are you dishonestly twisting what I wrote? The point is that it's possible to give constructive feedback instead of whining and bitching.

Originally posted by fearphage: