saito

How do you start Opera Dragonfly?

Saturday, 18. July 2009, 15:44:04

Opera's debug tool, Opera Dragonfly, is very useful, if you actually use it, especially if you use it with Opera 10.0 beta or Snapshot. Unfortunately, I have heard some said Firebug is superior by far, or the like. But before imitating such lines and blogging so over again, use it by yourself to see if it is really so.

Along with the major update of Opera itself, Opera Dragonfly of Opera 10.0 beta got better than before.

If you like to use it often, it's quite troublesome to following the menu, Tool, Advanced and Developer Tool with your mouse. With recent Snapshots, you can open menu by hitting "Alt", then using keyboard, hit T, A and D in succession after that.
Even if you are mouse favorite user, for starting Opera Dragonfly, you will easily memorize "Alt > T > A > D", and like it.

Summer, summer, summerSolar Eclipse

Comments

Tamil # 19. July 2009, 04:12

I use following gesture.

GestureRight, GestureUp, GestureLeft = Attach Developer Tools Window | Close Developer Tools Window

andol # 19. July 2009, 11:27

Even if you are mouse favorite user, for starting Opera Dragonfly, you will easily memorize "Alt > T > A > D", and like it.

Providing that you use English version of Opera.

saito # 19. July 2009, 13:11

@ Tamil Thanks for showing me a trick. I like it too.
@ andol Hmm, I use recent 10.0 Snapshot with Japanese lang.file, and it works.

Tamil # 19. July 2009, 13:24

andol # 19. July 2009, 18:46

Originally posted by saito:

Hmm, I use recent 10.0 Snapshot with Japanese lang.file, and it works.

For languages using latin characters Opera generates menu shortcuts automatically, using characters existing in menu strings. In case of Polish, your trick looks this way:
"Alt > N > Z > N".

Anyway, I think that using a custom button would be much easier and faster for mouse users.

Anonymous # 17. November 2009, 10:00

Mitya writes:

Hi guys - found this discussion whilst trying to find out a keyboard shortcut to open Dragonfly. Is there really not one? It seems crazy that there isn't one. Developers like me use it very frequently but don't want it open constantly due to screen space. I tried undocking it but found that occasionally it lost contact with the browser and failed to update with the latest DOM/CSS info as I changed site. I also get "this window has no runtime" occasionally, on different sites.

While I'm here, I think Dragonfly is good and has potential but isn't quite there yet. I'm guessing, from its functionality, that it is javascript driven. That would explain the omission of several things which the browser knows but which JS can't access, like the content of linked JS files, or info about what events are registered and to what elements. Lastly, on the subject of developer tools: the 'identify as' menu in the debug menu is useful but could do with providing more browser options (multiple version of IE, Safari etc).

Keep up the good work.