Opera Dragonfly vs. Firebug

Question

I'm Opera user for browsing and Firefox user for developing. Simply I can't work without Firebug and any other tools doesn't fit for me. Geeks from Opera often offers to use Dragonfly which purpose is almost the same like Firebug (JS debugger, DOM/CSS inspector, JS console, page load analysis, etc.). I've tried Dragonfly but returned to Firebug because of these reasons:

• Firebug loads faster than Dragonfly (ex. when inspecting element);
• Dragonfly doesn't have (or I have not found) how quickly disable some property of css. On FB you simply need click an icon next to prop. It already has.

I'm interested does anyone uses Dragonfly instead ob FB or any other tool? Why (not)? What main differences you see between these both tools?

Answer 1

Hi, you may or may not be aware that Opera Dragonfly is a sort of web application, loading from Opera's server on first usage and whenever it's upgraded. If you re-open it and the server version is not updated, it should load quickly from cache. I'm not sure that's always the case, YMMV, and I can completely understand that its unpredictable load time can be annoying. However, this way your are always using the latest version of Dragonfly without having to update any extension.

Which brings me to the second point: disabling CSS properties. This is now supported in a pretty obvious way in the latest version. I suggest you just try opening Dragonfly again :-D

Regarding comparisons, I'm inherently too biased to comment on this question... But anyway: My general feeling is that Firebug was a giant leap in web debugger UI design (if you're old enough to have used Venkman you know what I mean), however under the hood it doesn't feel stable to use. My use case is mostly the JS debugger (DOM inspector has always been more reliable) and I've seen the debugger misbehave in many weird little ways over the years. I'll quickly add that Dragonfly is not much better yet, it has known problems that can throw you completely off the track when stepping. The current version of Firebug may well be more stable than all past versions, but I'm still a bit reluctant to use it for complex JS debugging tasks, and prefer Dragonfly or Chrome's inspector. YMMV again.

..the main reason I prefer Dragonfly probably is that this user JS lets me use Dragonfly to step through ANY random script, no matter if it's sent over the wire as a whitespace-free text blob: http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/2008/05/13/script-formatter-user-js

But then, my use case is debugging ANY random page while most people's use case is to debug their own nicely formatted scripts :)

Answer 2

I use the developper tools of all the browsers! Even for Internet Explorer there are extra downloads for developers!

The problem is: it's not beacause one thing works in firefox, it works in IE6,7,8, Opera And Chrome.

What I like about internet exlporer tool is that you can choose which version you are debugging. So you do not need to download the collection pack (because 6 and 7 are almost the same)

All the tools have almost the same features.

Answer 3

Have to agree there, I spend 90% of my time making things work in ie and having the ability to render in ie7 or 8 with the ie developer tools is a big bonus.

When it comes to ie6 i tend to fire it up through spoon.net and then use the firebug lite bookmarklet to hack away, however these days you'll already have a rough idea of what will and won't work before you start.

...unfortunately working in finance a lot of your users will be stuck on ie6 for a considerable time so you just have to go with it.

personally i'm trying the other debuggers out to see if they're better than firebug but so far they're ok at best, however with the shift to webkit browsers Google Chrome's already got my vote.