Opera launches web page debugger Dragonfly

Opera has released a beta of Dragonfly, its debugging tool for web developers that allows them to look for errors in their web pages.

Dragonfly 1.0 is a fully-featured testing environment that sees Opera embed its debugging software directly into the browser, according to the firm.

Opera Dragonfly offers developers and web site operators easy tools for debugging JavaScript and for inspecting network traffic, data stores and cross-site scripting. Opera added that it could be used for testing on both internet and mobile web sites.

The software is now available in the Opera browser version 9.5 and above. Opera said that it could be activated in the developer tools menu, or by right clicking on a page element that needs inspecting when users have downloaded the lastest version.

Dragonfly was first announced three years ago, but this is the first time it has been built into the browser.

Opera is rapidly growing the ecosystem around its browser, and earlier this week released an application store for mobile devices. It also recently released a browser for touch-screen devices and claimed to have 100 million mobile users for its products.

With Dragonfly, the firm will be expecting to boost the performance of JavaScript on its browser, and in the beta release notes it explained that it would let developers build sophisticated Ajax applications more easily. Easy-to-access tools should also make problem solving, and spotting, easier.

A network inspector is also included, designed to study HTTP requests and response headers.

Opera said that for each a summary would be produced that includes information on response times and status. It added that developers could drill down further into this information to assess lag and the causes of lag.

An error console will let developers see when and where other problems occurred, the firm added.