Slashdot Mirror


Opera Open Sources Dragonfly

netux writes to mention that Opera has released Dragonfly, their answer to Firebug, as an open source project under the BSD license. The release features a complete architectural overhaul using a modern version of the Scope Protocol (STP-1), a Mercurial repository on BitBucket, and a Wiki to get the ball rolling. "This is Opera’s first full open source project, so there will be a learning curve. We ask you to bear with us while we get everything up and running and policies in place. Coming from a closed source background there are some hurdles to overcome, such as the current bug tracking system being on a closed server. We hope to migrate to an open bug tracking system as the project gets on its feet."

1 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. And all of this is already available in Chrome by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Last week I bought some DRAM for my aging Vista PC. Can you believe it? Vista just came out a couple years ago and it's already gotten to the point that the original amount of RAM is completely used up by the OS. XP didn't get that way until SP3!

    Anyway, I digress. There was RAM from many different companies, in many different configurations, with different speeds and all sorts of things that I never thought about when I bought my first computer way back in the old days when dinosaurs roamed the Albuquerque halls. Things have changed so much that I now have more RAM than my first computer had hard disk space!

    So all these different standards for RAM made it a pain in the ass, because not only was my computer only compatible with certain models, there was a different model for each RAM manufacturer.

    In the same way, using a debug tool to determine whether a webpage is working correctly is a crapshoot. Should I go with the best browser (Opera)? How about the most wide-spread browser (IE)? Or should I target the browser most likely to gain the most marketshare (Webkit, aka Chrome and Safari)? Or what about the old stalwart (Netscape)?

    They all purport to do the same thing, provide great debugging tools. But how can I trust them when they work so differently from each other and have such different levels of standards support?

    Opera is great to release these tools, but I'm afraid such low usage makes it useless for most purposes.