Opera Dragonfly review
Posted in Web Development on 11th July 2011

For some time in my opinion the De facto standard for web development has been Firefox and in particular additions such as Firebug (which is particularly good when it comes to JavaScript de-bugging) and the web developer tool bar. Which again, is a very good add-on. Its strengths are HTML & CSS inspections, along with generally anything you can visualise on the page. You can even re-size the web-browser to view your page in all manner of dimensions. Not only is it good for that but it's good for viewing cookies or session data. But much as I love Firefox, I have to say it can be a terrible memory. Especially if you add on lots of widgets/tools etc.

Google also has it's own version, that isn't as good visually as Firefox. But now there is a new contender.....

Opera Dragonfly

It actually comes built into the Opera browser. Ctrl+Shift+I will open up Dragonfly, which has a very similar look and behaviour to that of Google's inspect element. It seems to have pretty much all the default settings of its rivals Chrome and that of Firefox's Firebug & Web developer tool bar. But it's a cleaner, sleeker appearance. The errors tab lists all CSS and JavaScript errors, although some of them seem slightly minuscule, such as putting a space before declaring a property's value. Utilities offer a great way to take a screenshot of the current page, storage delivers results on cookie and session data. You can also affect the caching behaviour, run scripts for errors and view the DOM side-by-side of the CSS properties. So it's a really good attempt by Opera to try and surely raise the Opera browsers popularity which currently lies at 2.4% as of June 2011. By aiming to the developing world where de-bugging is key is a very shrewd business model. In terms of memory it performs well too, currently its uses about 98 MB, whilst Dragonfly is on. Compare that to Firefox which is at 157 MB and web-devleoper and Firebug are off. My only problem currently is that for me Opera seems a bit slow as a browser, maybe that's just me. Anyway, check it out see what you think, never hurt anyone to have another browser loaded on their system, even if it's just for checking how your pages are rendered.