Opera Mobile 10 and Its Remote Debugging Party Trick

Following on our Opera Mini 5 beta launch, we've just announced the release of another mobile browser — this time it's Opera Mobile 10 beta for Symbian. While they both feature a similar redesigned UI, Opera Mobile 10 makes the most of your smartphone's capabilities, featuring a full JavaScript and layout engine.

Naturally there are many improvements for mobile surfers to enjoy, but what will be of particular interest to developers are the enhancements to Presto, our rendering engine. Not only is it much faster than the previous incarnation of Opera Mobile, but you may also be impressed at its standards support. You can read more about Opera Mobile 10 from a developer's perspective over at dev.opera.

In addition there is one more feature aimed at developers that we're particularly proud of and that is the ability to remotely debug a web page on your mobile phone using Opera Dragonfly on your desktop. Put more simply, as you edit the web page's code on your desktop, its display is dynamically updated on your mobile phone. The process is as follows:

<ol><li>(Desktop): Make a note of your local IP address and fire up Dragonfly.</li><li>(Desktop): Enable remote debug in Settings and click Apply then OK in the pop-up dialog box.</li><li>(Mobile): Open opera:debug, enter your desktop's IP address and click Connect then OK in the pop-up dialog box.</li><li>(Desktop): Click OK in the pop-up dialog box to download the new version of Dragonfly, then click OK.</li><li>(Mobile): Click Connect again in opera:debug, then click OK in the pop-up dialog box.</li><li>(Mobile): Open the web page you want to debug, ideally in a new tab.</li><li>(Desktop): Select the site to debug in Dragonfly and edit the HTML and CSS to your heart's content.</li></ol>


We've made a short video to show remote debugging in action with captions for people that suffer from deafness/limited hearing (or if you just want to watch it without disturbing those around you). Furthermore, the captions are also available in English, Japanese and Russian.