Opera Software Released Opera Dragonfly as an open source project (opens in new tab)

Not being familiar, I had to look this up (the article didn't state, but linked to their wiki).

"Opera Dragonfly is Opera’s debugging toolkit. It consists of tools such as a DOM, CSS and network inspector, JavaScript debugger, error console and command line. Opera Dragonfly is distributed with the Opera desktop browser"...

Dragonfly is particularly interesting because it uses the "Scope Protocol" (http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/scope-interface/) to access Opera. In other words you can remotely debug a page on a headless machine running Opera. Or, if other browsers implemented the Scope protocol then you could debug them with Dragonfly too.

On the flip-side you could build your own debugger for Opera which used the Scope protocol to access what was happening in the browser.

I think this is something that the industry really needs, to decouple browser debugging, from browser plugins. I'm glad Opera are making this step.

I really hope this is a step they mean to extend through their browsers. Opera have always struck me as the most innovative of the browser developers and I often look to them to see what will be commonplace next.

I have been using dragonfly for a while now and am really happy that it is open source. Its about as powerful as firebug but there are still some needed features that opening it up could bring.

I've been using Opera for years, and I go back and forth between Dragonfly and Firebug. Firefox + Firebug is sooo sloooww. But, Dragonfly isn't quite as full featured.

BTW, Opera 10.5 is really fast. The Beta RC is still crashing quite a bit, but I really like the new features that have been added.

I think this is an excellent move. I used Opera for a long time, but found it to be too buggy so I stopped and DragonFly takes a long time to load and isn't as good as FireFly, so I just stopped using Opera, but I do like it.