Opera debuts Dragonfly developer toolkit

Opera Dragonfly, Opera’s developer toolkit, makes its full debut today. Now mature after a six-week beta, the new Opera Dragonfly emerges with a collection of tools to make web design and development faster, smarter and easier.

Three reasons why you should consider Opera Dragonfly in your web development arsenal:

1. Tools for designers
Our Chief Technology Officer created Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you know we love designers. Opera Dragonfly has a whole section of utilities to help designers make a more glorious Web. Advanced color-picking tools let you match colors precisely, and, once you have selected those colors, you can store them in a palette for later use. You can examine font and style changes live, and even debug Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

2. Going mobile
If you're serious about developing for the mobile Web, Opera Dragonfly gives you a set of tools to make mobile development easier. If you want to debug your site on a mobile device, just turn on remote debugging. Opera Dragonfly will connect to Opera Mobile and let you debug directly on the device. But why stop there? You can even hack your site on tablets, TVs or your colleagues' computers with the remote debugging feature. And, Opera Dragonfly can mask as other browsers to help ensure cross-platform mobile compatibility.

3. Always updated
Opera Dragonfly is what we call a hybrid web application. What does that mean? It means you’ll never need to update it, since the latest version is always pulled from the Web. And it will always be compatible with the version of Opera you’re using.

Of course, Opera Dragonfly has everything else you expect in a state-of-the-art toolkit, including:

- DOM inspector: Our own Opera Dragonfly manual says it best, “The DOM Inspector is like View Source on steroids”. Explore the document and edit it live, right before your eyes.

- JavaScript debugger: Just one wrong line and your masterful script is in ruins. So, we make it easy to go through your code with conditional breakpoints, deep property inspection and watches to turn even the most jumbled JavaScript into a thing of beauty.

- Inspect network loads, resources and storage: Opera Dragonfly dives into the guts of your site to show you how items load, how cookies and HTML5 Web Storage operate, and how resources affect site performance and compatibility.

“Developers of the world, unite! You have nothing to save but your time, frustration and probably some hair,” said David Storey, Chief Web Opener and Product Manager for Opera Dragonfly. “Opera Dragonfly is more refined, more beautiful and more awesome than our earlier releases. But don’t take our word for it. Try it yourself and see if it makes your day just a little bit better.”

How do I get Opera Dragonfly?
If you have the Opera browser then just right-click any page and select “Inspect Element”. That’s it. If you don’t have the Opera browser, it’s a free download from http://www.opera.com/.