Opera Software has embedded a beta set of tools into its web browser, collectively called Dragonfly, that can help developers find errors in their complex web pages, the company announced on Monday.


Dragonfly is not the first browser-based debugger. Mozilla, for example, offers Firebug, and Google's Chrome browser also features some built-in element inspection features as well. Dragonfly also offers the ability to debug web pages on smartphones, televisions and other devices, by hooking them up to the developer's PC.

In open-source development for nearly five years, Dragonfly was designed to help web page designers grapple with increasingly complex web pages and web applications.

"We were coming into an age where JavaScript was becoming popular again, and Ajax was the buzzword on everyone's lips. Creating complex web applications without such tools made it hard to support Opera on those services," Storey said, in an interview on the Opera site.


With the JavaScript debugger, developers can monitor specific variables or isolate the activity of a specific expression. The network inspector can be used to debug a slow-loading web page, observing resources as they are downloaded.

