Debug CSS3 (and more) with a dragonfly

April 25th, 2008 by David Storey 11 comments, leave your own »

Opera has one of the better levels of support for CSS3 (and other standards), making it an ideal platform for experimenting with future technologies and new techniques that these standards will offer. However, this has always been let down by the fact that Opera is very lacking in the web developer tools segment. To be frank, Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar blow away anything Opera has offered in this realm.

This short coming is about to change soon. Opera has just announced today, with the release of Opera 95 beta 2, that Opera Dragonfly will be Opera’s web developer tools. These will be released as an alpha on the 6th of May. In line with their alpha status, the tools will not be feature complete, but they will show a good foundation of Opera’s developer tool vision.

Once released, Opera is looking for feedback on the tools, to make sure they fit the needs of real world web developers and designers. I’m looking forward to web developers getting their hands on the Opera Dragonfly and finding out what the impressions are. If you are interested then go the the Opera Dragonfly website on the 6th or just open the Web Developer menu item from the tools menu. In the mean time, Opera 9.5 beta 2 (Kestrel) has been released today, so it is a good time to check out what CSS3 properties it supports.

  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Print this article!
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
April 25th, 2008 by David Storey in CSS3.info. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 Comments to “Debug CSS3 (and more) with a dragonfly”

  1. quark Says:
    April 25th, 2008 at 1:00 am

    The only thing that I’m missing in Opera is the advanced DevTools… So I hope that DragonFly will eat FireBug :)

  2. Darken Says:
    April 25th, 2008 at 1:50 am

    Good news!

    I hope that DragonFly will not be a Web based tools. :)

  3. Mrmil Says:
    April 25th, 2008 at 8:44 am

    A merge of Firebug, Marc’s HTML Validator and Web Developer would be awesome! :D

  4. Блог для вебмастеров » Opera Dragonfly Says:
    April 25th, 2008 at 1:23 pm

    [...] css3.info рейтинг: 0  Loading [...]

  5. jive Says:
    April 25th, 2008 at 5:06 pm

    Now if Safari would get something like Web Developer Tools that would be great. Of course IE7 needs to improve the one it has available, its better than nothing but it’s not as good as it could be.

  6. que Says:
    April 25th, 2008 at 7:57 pm

    @Darken
    >I hope that DragonFly will not be a Web based tools. :)
    Actually they will. There’s a option in opera:config ‘Developer Tools URL’

  7. Martin Fallend Says:
    April 26th, 2008 at 7:52 pm

    @jive: with Safari 3.1 there’s a “Develop”-Menu (deactivating Styles, JS, …) & a “Web Inspector” you have nearly everything you need

  8. JulesLt Says:
    April 28th, 2008 at 5:56 pm

    As per Martin - Safari - or rather WebKit - has the Web Inspector which has been a v.nice way of looking at CSS issues for some time (I particularly like the way it highlights the selected element).

    There’s also Drosera, which is a Javascript Debugger for WebKit - which is currently only ‘experimental’ on anything except the Mac branch, but certainly exists for Windows.

  9. Michael Johnson Says:
    April 29th, 2008 at 3:52 pm

    @que, @Darken: Actually, the Developer Tools URL setting is for the current web based stuff and has nothing to do with Dragonfly, AFAIK. IIRC, they added a direct link to the web-based tools as a menu/command option at some point.

  10. CSSquirrel » Blog Archive » Enter the Dragonfly Says:
    April 29th, 2008 at 9:55 pm

    [...] that’ll soon change. As I read at CSS3.Info, Opera’s mysterious upcoming product, Dragonfly, has finally had some of the mystery [...]

  11. شات Says:
    May 29th, 2008 at 3:34 pm

    There’s also Drosera, which is a Javascript Debugger for WebKit

    Thanks

Leave a Comment