Hello World - Introducing Opera Dragonfly

Opera Dragonfly

Today we released the first alpha of our new web developer tool. The objective for this first alpha release is to get feedback and of course allow you to start using it. You should expect it to be buggy and even missing some key features, but that is what alpha means.

It is however not entirely correct that we are releasing the tool early in the development. The foundation for Opera Dragonfly has been worked on for more than two years. The phases we have completed so far are:

  • Interviews with web developers how they use developer tools and how they would like such a tool to be.
  • Early prototype for DOM inspector and DOM snapshot.
  • Implementation of the Scope protocol in Presto (Supported in Core 2.1 and later).
  • Support for Dragonfly in Opera 9.5 beta 2.
  • Feature development for JavaScript debugger and CSS/DOM inspector.

We do believe the foundation for the tool is very strong and that we are building a tool that will become a popular choice among developers. Most importantly we have designed Opera Dragonfly from scratch to be able to debug web applications on remote devices, something we believe will be key moving forward.

The road ahead

The next major release we have planned is alpha 2. This will be completed before the final version of Kestrel (Opera 9.5) is released. The focus for alpha 2 is:

  • improved handling of threads in the JavaScript debugger
  • inline CSS editing
  • infrastructure for localization
  • improved remote debugging

But for now — Happy testing!

- The Opera Dragonfly team