Earlier this year, Opera announced Dragonfly, a developer tool to compete with Firebug, the popular web development extension for Firefox.

Since I have been working more on front-end development lately, I’ve been testing both Firebug and Dragonfly. Opera is my browser of choice, so I really want to use Dragonfly… However, it turns out that it’s not that great, even though they want it to be. A tagline I’ve seen used, is that Dragonfly is “like Firebug, evolved”. Well that certainly sounds good! Incidentally, the tag line for Firebug is “web development evolved”.

After trying Dragonfly a bit on and off for a while, and recently reading a bit more about it, the new project lead for the project spotted my whining on Twitter last week, and asked me for feedback. Giving constructive feedback can be difficult, but I pointed out a few things, and I’ll summarize it here for your pleasure.

While I’m sure Dragonfly has many nice features (such as remote debugging, which is pretty nice if you’re doing web development for a special device), the user interface seems clunky and unintuitive. This is perhaps somewhat vague, and I did mention some specifics on Twitter. In general I found Dragonfly more difficult to navigate and work with than Firebug.

As a small and somewhat silly example, take a look at the following screenshots:

The first shows Firebug, the second is Dragonfly. Both have been opened on Gmail, and are shown in their default state. Firebug shows the DOM and the CSS, while Dragonfly shows … Well … Scripts? Why is about:blank in the script list? To find the DOM in Dragonfly, I actually have to click the DOM tab on top, and then a DOM tab on bottom again.

I’m sure some of the things I find irritating about Dragonfly will go away as I get used to it, but I can’t shake the feeling that the developers are focusing on features instead of usability. The good thing however, is that this is most likely something they will use extensively themselves, as they do a lot of in-house web application development at Opera, so hopefully they will over time refactor the user interface. Or perhaps not. Who knows.