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Opera DragonFly released

May 06th, 2008

Since I gave some dap to IE for getting a developer toolkit embedded into Internet Explorer 8, I feel like I should also give kudos to Opera for releasing the top-secret and closely guarded Dragonfly.  Opera annoyed the hell out of me at SxSW when they devoted an entire booth to promoting “Dragonfly”, but refused to tell me anything about it.

I’ve only had a quick look of it, but it does look like a pretty slick tool.  The main problem I see for them here, is that they are fourth in the market (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) and fourth to get a developer toolkit.  Its hard to work from a position of weakness like that.  I hope they prove me wrong, since competition is always good for what we do, and I have to say, I’ve always had a soft spot for Opera.

Opera Dragonfly

If you have the chance to play, please leave comments with what you think of it!  How does it compare to Firebug?  How does it compare to IE?

This entry was made on May 06th, 2008 @ 12:12 and filed into Browsers.

Comments

James wrote on May 06th, 2008 @ 15:29

The developer tools in IE and Safari are a poor relation to Firebug and the only real purpose they serve is trying to debug sites within that browser.

I havent tried Dragonfly yet but if its good enough then it may be become the platform of choice for developing standards compliant sites - which is where i think Opera are trying to push their browser with this release.

TermiT wrote on May 07th, 2008 @ 0:29

Opera DragonFly suck, because it runs online, and you can’t properly debug your webpages on localhost.
Firebug - godsend!

Sam Dark wrote on May 07th, 2008 @ 5:13

TermiT
Actually you can run it from localhost without any problem (see opera:config).

Derek
Since it’s alpha1 it can’t be compared to mighty FireBug but it’s already a bit better than Safari or IE tools.

John_Betong wrote on May 08th, 2008 @ 7:27

Both Bill Gates and Google done quite well when they entered the markets so let’s hope Dragonfly can do the same. The more the merrier.

Nick Husher wrote on May 08th, 2008 @ 8:26

I think it’s incorrect to say that Opera is working from a position of weakness; Opera does very well in the embedded and mobile sectors, which is how they actually make their money. The desktop browser is something that flows out of their relationships with Nintendo and Nokia.

Considering they’ve made a point since Opera 7-ish to be on the leading edge of web standards, I think Opera holds a very important role in the browser market, even if it’s a small one. It doesn’t look like they’ll be going anywhere any time soon.

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