My Opera
Opera Dragonfly 1.1 just launched
By David Storeydstorey. Thursday, September 1, 2011 7:00:00 AM
After a number of release candidates we launched Opera Dragonfly 1.1 today. Around 3 and a half months ago we launched version 1.0 to critical acclaim. We’ve not rested on our laurels since then and have been hard at work responding to feedback, squashing over 200 bugs, adding new features, perfecting existing ones, and polishing the user interface. We believe we now have an even better product, and we’re excited to get it out the door. We look forward to the feedback from web developers and hope it makes their experience developing for Opera smoother.
What’s new?
There are a lot of new and polished features in Opera Dragonfly 1.1. For full details see the what’s new section.
DOM Inspector
As part of the general improvements to search in Opera Dragonfly, the DOM Inspector has a new search panel. This offers a number of advanced options such as searching with RegExp, or using CSS selectors or XPath to find elements.
There is now support for pseudo classes and pseudo elements. Pseudo elements can be seen in the DOM and pseudo classes for matching elements can be seen in the Style Inspector. SVG presentation attributes are also now shown in the style inspector so you can use the same debugging features as regular CSS properties. Another enhancement to the style inspector is that the style rules now link to the correct line where it is defined in the original CSS file in the Resource Inspector. This was the main issue users were having with Opera Dragonfly 1.0 so it should make a few users happy.
JavaScript Debugger
Like the DOM Inspector, the search feature in the JavaScript Debugger has been vastly improved. The advanced search window has now been removed and it is replaced with a search panel. The option to search in multiple scripts is still present, but now there are additional options to search via RegExp and ignore case. It is also possible to ignore injected scripts when searching in all files.
Network Inspector
Another criticism of Opera Dragonfly 1.0 was that it wasn't possible to inspect POST data. We’ve improved the Network Inspector to support POST and multipart POST. This should make the Network Inspector much more useful.
Resource Inspector
We’ve added a search field in the Resource Inspector so that is is possible to find what you are looking for in text based resources. This was another much requested feature that users will hopefully enjoy. The Resource Inspector is also better integrated with the Style Inspector and the Error Log
Storage Inspector
The Local Storage, Session Storage and Widgets Preferences panels have been upgraded to the UI used for cookies in Opera Dragonfly 1.0. This is something we ran out of time to implement in the previous version and should make the new version much more consistent.Error Log
The old Error Log has been ripped out and replaced with a shiny upgraded version. It has quite a few enhancements including:
- UI redesign taking up less real estate
- The resource type in now shown in the overview instead of the severity level
- Error badge matches currently active view rather than all errors
- Less common error types have been merged into an Other panel
- Linked up error line to the Resource line number
- Replaced search with filter
- Removed console.* entries (with option to add back)
- Errors are shown from before Opera Dragonfly was open (Opera 12 only)
For those of you still using the native Error Console you might want to try using the Opera Dragonfly version, especially once Opera 12 comes out later this year when Opera Dragonfly will be able to access the errors from before it was opened.
Console
In Opera Dragonfly 1.1 we have added a new full panel version of the Console. This complements the HUD version that is available when pressing Esc. This version is most useful when working full time in the console, while the HUD is useful when switching quickly between it and another tool.
Other enhancements include auto-complete for native objects, inline expandable objects (another much requested feature) and highlighting console.warn, console.info and console.error. This release should make it much more useful for Console power users.
Utilities
We've added a screen ruler to the Utilities. It can be used in the screen shot to measure pixels on both the x and y axis. It snaps to the pixel so it should be useful even when zooming.
What next?
We're really excited about the refinements and new features we've added to this release, and we hope developers will like them too. We constantly strive to make Opera Dragonfly better, but most importantly suited to the needs of our end users — so if you have any issues or suggestions, we'd appreciate your feedback about Opera Dragonfly 1.1.
Patrick H. Laukepatrickhlauke # Wednesday, August 31, 2011 10:47:52 PM
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank David Storey for his dedication and commitment as product manager for Opera Dragonfly - just one small part of his effort to work for, and with, developers out there - spreading the word not just about Opera, but web standards and best practices.
Sadly this release of Opera Dragonfly is David's last hurrah here at Opera, as he's now moving on to exciting new ventures. As his successor in the role of product manager I've certainly got my work cut out for myself...some mighty big boots to fill. But I hope I'll do the product, the team, and our users justice!
Swapnil RustagiSwapnil99pro # Thursday, September 1, 2011 9:53:55 AM
d4rkn1ght # Thursday, September 1, 2011 12:50:58 PM
FransFrenzie # Thursday, September 1, 2011 2:11:05 PM
Haunted GhostHauntedGhost # Thursday, September 1, 2011 3:03:18 PM
Coyotee # Thursday, September 1, 2011 3:30:52 PM
Francis Adu-Gyamfiicewalker2g # Thursday, September 1, 2011 9:34:44 PM
MUCH LOVE!!!!!
Øyvind Flatvaloyvindj # Friday, September 2, 2011 1:32:46 PM
Norwegian: "Skriv "// hjelp()" for å få mer informasjon"
The command still only triggers the help when written in english.
// help()
reported as issue #94 over on the bitbucket page.
edit: Accidentally some words
F.V.F-V # Friday, September 2, 2011 1:56:13 PM
One of my wishes for future releases is further refinement in the interface, especially those who prefer or must use a keyboard will find much of Dragonfly's features hard or impossible to use. With Patrick's expertise in this area I hope improvements on accessibility are now closer to being implemented.
David Storeydstorey # Friday, September 2, 2011 8:15:32 PM
Hi Fabian,
There is a section on the customer requirements that I wrote about both editing consistency and keyboard accessibility, so it isn't forgotten about and it is planned. We basically need a spec for how keyboard access will work in Dragonfly. That may take some time to spec out well and cover all the cases. We do plan for 1.2 to try to solve the editing consistency issue (including around keyboard access), in particular around the DOM and CSS editing. The DOM panel keyboard access is more mature than the rest and was sort of a prototype for keyboard access in general. The CSS keyboard accessibility (styles panel) will likely become consistent with the DOM view. That will be one step forward, but of course far from all the way there. I'd personally like to see ARIA used to mark up the various components, which will get us further down the path. I don't think that will get done by 1.2.
What we need is someone that can help with any spec and test if that spec makes sense. I expect a lot of the work is in getting the spec right rather than in the implementation, although that takes time too. Luckily Opera Dragonfly is open source so if anyone wants to help in anyway with this, from volunteering to test to helping with the spec to development then they're welcome to lend a hand. If you can for example file bugs in the tracker on use cases that do not work or things that need to work differently or so on that would be helpful. It might be best to start out with a wiki page to plan out how it should work. For example list the things that are hard to use (and why) or impossible to use with the keyboard, things that are inconsistent, etc. and suggestions on how it should work.
ncc50446 # Saturday, September 3, 2011 1:01:13 AM
Bye David, Good luck
Sadly, I haven't been able to do quite as much programming as I wish, but when I do, Dragonfly comes in handy
Darko Pantićpdarko # Saturday, September 3, 2011 7:22:29 PM
Originally posted by dstorey:
While this is nice feature it increases Dragonfly start-up time significantly. Dragonfly itself starts up pretty fast but it takes time to populate Error log. You should add an option to disable this feature.
Testing on Fedora 14 i386.
Darko Pantićpdarko # Saturday, September 3, 2011 7:38:43 PM
In utilities screen ruler cannot be moved outside of screen-shot area so you cannot measure distance from top of (captured part of) page.
David Håsätherhzr # Monday, September 5, 2011 11:30:27 AM
Originally posted by pdarko:
Yep, known bug.Daniel Herzogdanfoooo # Monday, September 5, 2011 2:42:33 PM
Originally posted by pdarko:
Can you tell me what page that was on, and/or how many errors were shown? Will look into it, probably it can be improved so we don't need an option to disable the feature. Thanks!
Darko Pantićpdarko # Monday, September 5, 2011 5:28:30 PM
Edit:
I found a way to "disable" loading old messages in error log. Since most messages are about CSS I set CSS filter to "a".This hack is actually not that good. There is still delay until old log is processed.