Firebug vs Dragonfly

Howdy all, I just thought I would throw my 2 cents in there..

Firstly; Opera is a good browser and this sort of thing can only make it better.. all I can say is, it's about time. heh.. The old developer toolkit wasn't nearly as good as this one. Thank you for that.

I program professionally for big blue and as such have to test everything we do in IE6, IE7, IE8 (I list all three because they are all different..*sigh*), Firefox, Safari and Opera. Opera is by far the fastest. But Firefox is the easiest to program for because of Firebug. I really do believe that Firefox is the darling because of Firebug.

If Dragonfly can adopt all the features of Firebug and outperform it as it would likely do, then you would likely beat Firefox.. at least from this developers stand point.

My comparison to Firebug below aren't meant to rub your noses in it, but just rather to give you my opinion of areas you need to consider.


1. No XHR Monitoring. I think this is one of the primary uses for any sort of developer toolkit of this nature. I need, and I do mean need, to see not only the exact request as it was made by my script, but the headers and response. This is a no brainer guys and I'm sure you're working on it.. I just wanted to mention it. Firebug does this nicely and its pretty important to what I do.

2. Your console is next to worthless. Sorry guys. If XHR is the primary use for a tool like this, console is a very close second. More over, I'll agree that console.log, .error, .warn (etc..) are industry standards at this point (Safari supports it) and should be adopted by Dragonfly.

Window.Opera.postError is cumbersome, and isn't very useful considering the quality of the information provided by the others.

When I dump something to the console I want it to be the clickable object.. I mean if I .log an object, make it so I can drill into that object. Don't just give me the constructor.toString().. Not very useful.. (Okay its very useful, but being able to click down is even more so..) Firebug does this nicely, and I find that I use this a lot.

Your CSS console is nice, but it suffers the same issue. It just dumps a string, where as a link that actually takes you to the offending line would be much more useful. Sure you say this line number that says this, but sometimes clicking into it gives you contextual input that helps you resolve issues.

3. Speaking of CSS, No real time style editing? This one is pretty important to me as well.. I want to be able to pull up the styles and adjust something in real time. Either by editing the numbers in the layout area or in the styles area.. and actually see it affect the page. I use this in Firebug quite a lot and its pretty important to making a tool worth while in my book.

4. Javascript Profiling. Anyone who does any serious ecma scripting is gonna tell you, one bad loop and you're screwed. A profiling tool goes a long way towards explaining whats going wrong and giving you some idea about how to fix it.

You already have a fantastic stack trace (thank you!), so I bet you are already working on some sort of profiler.. I do use this.. I realize that you guys are threaded and that might make things a tad tough, but if you could sort it out it would be great.


Those are my big 4.. There are other things you could do to make it better, but those 4 are the ones that I really think would put you over the top.

You guys are well on your way to an awesome tool, and its already in my toolbox and has already helped me snuf a couple of annoying bugs..

Right now, I think Firebug is still better -- but it's a close race and I only forsee it getting closer.

Adding notes:

1. Already on its way.

2. I do agree with this one, and Safari generally suffers from the same thing, though the WebKit console has started showing some vast improvements here.

3. Already on its way.

4. Already on its way (I think, unless I misunderstood something).

Keep in mind, Dragonfly hasn't even reached beta, yet. :-) From http://www.opera.com/products/dragonfly/

"The initial alpha release is just the beginning. Opera Dragonfly has a fully featured road map, including support for editing of CSS, JavaScript and the DOM, a single window mode, improved JavaScript thread handling, XHR and HTTP monitoring, improved keyboard navigation, and translation into a number of languages."

@Palamedes && frozeno: Welcome to the forums

Originally posted by Palamedes:

If XHR is the primary use for a tool like this, console is a very close second.

Keep in mind that the way you use the tool is not representative of how everyone uses the tool. XHR logging is very useful to me but it is not the most important or most used thing in firebug for me. If you would like xhr logging in all browsers, you can use a wrapper script to get a lot of the same effects. Personally the dom exploration, css tools, and js profiling are much more important to me but I don't necessarily represent any more people than you do.

Originally posted by Palamedes:

Your CSS console is nice, but it suffers the same issue. It just dumps a string, where as a link that actually takes you to the offending line would be much more useful. Sure you say this line number that says this, but sometimes clicking into it gives you contextual input that helps you resolve issues.

+1

Another thing that dragonfly needs is clipboard access to copy xpath and css selectors.

Originally posted by Palamedes:

2. Your console is next to worthless. Sorry guys. If XHR is the primary use for a tool like this, console is a very close second. More over, I'll agree that console.log, .error, .warn (etc..) are industry standards at this point (Safari supports it) and should be adopted by Dragonfly.

I wouldn't say there is an industry standard at this point. Firebug's console is better than anything else at the moment, but I can imagine better - something like syslog comes to mind.

Originally posted by Palamedes:

When I dump something to the console I want it to be the clickable object.. I mean if I .log an object, make it so I can drill into that object. Don't just give me the constructor.toString().. Not very useful.. (Okay its very useful, but being able to click down is even more so..) Firebug does this nicely, and I find that I use this a lot.

Not sure on this one. It's amazing when you first discover it, but then you realize that it isn't a snapshot of the object so what you see doesn't necessarily correlate with the bug you are investigating.