CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

Crafted deep in the lands of ice and snow, Opera is the best browser that you’ve never used, unless you’re a web developer or own a web-capable Nintendo console. At least, that’s what the statistics I’ve seen imply.

This isn’t to say the browser sucks. Far from it. It’s generally fast, it’s incredibly standards-compliant, and there’s versions of it for everything from my PC to my phone to my Wii. One thing that has kept me from using it much is Firefox. Mozilla’s love child is comparable in standards compliance and has a robust line of add-ons that extends the browser’s functionality immensely, allowing all sorts of nifty functions. In particular I’ve been making good use of FireFTP, Greasemonkey, Operator, Personas, ColorZilla, and Web Developer (to name a few).

But the key add-on that I use daily at work, saving myself (and by extension my employer and the clients) tons of time with is Firebug, a web developer’s debugging dream. I’m not going to wax poetic about its many features here, but I’ll just add that it’s indispensable. Without it, the other browsers just can’t keep my attention.

Maybe that’ll soon change. As I read at CSS3.Info, Opera’s mysterious upcoming product, Dragonfly, has finally had some of the mystery unveiled. It is a debug tool that will start showing up in Opera 9.5 beta 2, and if the buzz is correct, it’ll be to Opera what Firebug is to Firefox.

This is potentially “hot”. I’m actually surprised that the likes of Håkon Wium Lie (Father of CSS, CTO of Opera Software, and guy with a first name that is unpronounceable in the English language) hadn’t devised something like this sooner. To say that Opera is obsessed with web standards and the whole web development process is something of an understatement. Prior to today I was actually planning a diatribe to this effect, as even IE has it’s web developer toolbar (which isn’t precisely amazing or perhaps very useful, but at least they’re trying), so why hadn’t Opera showed up to the dance?

Well, starting May 6th, they will be. That said, I’m not really a browser beta tester, as I’m more concerned about how websites look like for clients right now (although I’m keenly interested in the improvements coming to Firefox, IE, and Opera with their upcoming versions), so I won’t be seeing much personal use of this product until 9.5 comes out of beta. Still, maybe this will be enough to make me switch to Opera.

Then, considering that Firefox 3 is on the horizon and Opera lacks Greasemonkey and all the other goodies, maybe not.

Tags: Add-ons, Dragonfly, Opera

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.