Opera Dragonfly Goes Open Source

By Vygantas Lipskas | February 11, 2010 | 6 Comments

Opera Dragonfly Goes Open SourceOne of the Opera Dragonfly developers, David Storey, has recently announced that Opera’s debugging tool has gone open-source and can already be viewed at the following BitBucket page.

As company has never launched a true open source project before, there will be a learning curve.

It was also said, that current Opera Dragonfly development is focused on JavaScript debugger improvements.

Thanks to Daniel Hendrycks for news tip.

[digg-reddit-me]


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas Lipskas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • http://www.pneumatig.com.pl pneumatyka

    Dragonfly has a great potential. Its extremely fast and responsive, and wonderful highlighting (among other features). It lacks fast CSS disable/enable feature, and POST response content view, but this can be done quite fast at the moment.

    Then I would like to see Dragonfly both in FF and IE – AFAIK it should be possible, since its mostly JavaScript anyway. Am I right?

    • nobody

      why would you want or need dragonfly in FF and IE?

      there is no single feature dragonfly has (except for remote debugging, that does not work in most cases anyway) that firebug or visualStudio+ieDEVtoolbar do not have.

      and no, it isnt possible, because DF uses scope protocol, that both FF and IE are completly ignoring and will never look at it.

      and as a final touch – debugging FF with Opera’ tool, or IE with FF tool is completly impossible, unless all the engines start interpreting standards in the same way. that wont ever happen.

      • http://www.pneumatig.com.pl pneumatyka

        “why would you want or need dragonfly in FF and IE?”

        Dragonfly is way faster then firebug. Besides I simply would like to have same set of features, while debugging in all browsers.

        “there is no single feature dragonfly has, that firebug or visualStudio+ieDEVtoolbar do not have.”
        Yep, I know – I simply find dragonfly faster (as mentioned), and I like the way new dragonfly highlights elements.

        “and no, it isnt possible, because DF uses scope protocol, that both FF and IE are completly ignoring and will never look at it.”
        Well, who knows, they might – if it could be really useful. I don’t know to much about it yet, so I cannot make such statements.

        “unless all the engines start interpreting standards in the same way.”
        Why? What would happen if I would run Dragonfly in firebug? I would see DOM structure, each element css, http headers, all other stuff, where is the problem here? And I could change it. If you are referring to some display problems, caused by wrong understanding something why not prepare simple javascript to overcome those problems?
        I don’t see why interpreting standards would be a problem here?

        • nobody

          well, most problems over the net comes from browsers understanding ‘standards’ in different ways. there are COUNTLESS things, that are interpreted in ‘slightly’ different ways. that slight differences are what makes the web unfortunatelly.

          display problems, dom properties (browsers differ i.e.: in what are the default values of certain properties), event handling ( look at quirksmode.org event compatibility table.. there are almost no events handled identicaly. and there is the whole topic of javascript, that is the sole reason why dev tools are so important. you simply cannot debug js problems in browser A using engine B. it simply doesnt work that way.

          final reason why not to use dragonfly at all, is that this is very very stopgap solution, that doesnt offer really any functionality, even the basic one. problem is, that it is almost 3 years old now, and still is nowhere..

          • http://www.pneumatig.com.pl pneumatyka

            Yep, you are right about JavaScript. Indeed its impossible to debug it this way.
            I was thinking mostly about changing content/css, which is only part of a problem indeed.

            And about Dragonfly, will see soon how good are those strong foundations. It doesn’t have new features, but I guess you can agree that its fast, and stable.

  • aavv

    I think opera made wise decision, because a lot of people want opera an open sourceand opera make part of its developing process an open source, moreover, Opera need to solve the most annoying problem in its browser (compatability) this can make people contribute to it and if other browser adher to that tool, web will be 100% compatible with Opera

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