Opera delivers Dragonfly developer tools beta

Web developers can now access a beta version of the Opera Dragonfly 1.0 development tools — including a JavaScript debugger, DOM, network and storage inspectors — which are designed to help assess the performance and design of a website.

Opera launched the beta version of the open-source tools — codenamed Dragonfly — on Monday at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Texas, where it is also expected to unveil Opera 11.10, known as Barracuda.

The Dragonfly toolset is built into the Opera browser and loads automatically when you open a web page. It provides an improved JavaScript debugger that now has its own panel, supports new types of breakpoints — an intentional pause for debugging purposes — and allows for more precise control, the company said.

Users can also see how well their site performs using the network inspector, which Opera said helps developers identify latency issues, view cached resources and view how — and in what order — a site's assets download.

An entire site's resources — such as images, scripts, fonts and HTML files can be viewed at once, or individually, using the resource inspector option.

Opera said the tools also help developers see how well their website handles data via the storage inspector. This tool allows users to dynamically update and test cookies, as well as HTML 5 web storage performance.

The suite can be used for debugging websites on a variety of devices, as it supports Opera Presto-based products, such as Opera Mobile and Opera Widgets.

Previously available in alpha form, Opera Dragonfly is included in Opera 9.5 and above and can be activated from the developer tools menu in the browser. Users of Opera 10.5 or above can select the 'Inspect Element' option by right-clicking on any page element.