New experimental with Console fixes and UI tweaks

October 6, 2011 · by Patrick H. Lauke

We have a new build up on the experimental branch.

https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/experimental/

The main focus this time has been to improve some of the performance and functionality aspects of the Console.

Rendering output to the Console has now been considerably optimised. For example, this innocent-looking piece of code used to take about 3 seconds (depending on your specific hardware/OS) to render all the output:

for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) { console.log(i); }

With our latest performance enhancements, the output is displayed almost instantly.

We have also added the ability to trigger breakpoints directly from the Console. If you have a breakpoint set in f(), you can now trigger it by calling the method from the Console's command line:

>>> f()

But not all new improvements are hidden under the hood. This experimental release also features a few UI tweaks.

Overall, the grey icons have now been made a tad lighter, buttons have been given a bit more padding, and related buttons are now grouped together. This should give a much clearer, more pleasant debugging experience.

There are lots more little bug fixes and changes in this release - see the changelogs.

Readers' comments 15

Left under the original article, as archived.

ouzowtfThursday, October 6, 2011 5:52:04 PM
Çağlar YeşilyurtThursday, October 6, 2011 6:26:11 PM
New buttons are very sweet.

Sometimes, when I refresh a web page, Opera freezes and then it crashes. When it is opened, Dragonfly is opened as well. It continuously crashed an restarted unless I close Dragonfly. I experienced that on Opera 11.50 frequently. However, it seems fixed extremely after releasing Dragonfly 1.1 and Opera 11.51. I fear that Opera crashes when I refresh a web page using Dragonfly. These situations can be considerable as major bugs of Dragonfly.
ncc50446Thursday, October 6, 2011 7:20:10 PM
Originally posted by greench:

Sometimes, when I refresh a web page, Opera freezes and then it crashes. When it is opened, Dragonfly is opened as well. It continuously crashed an restarted unless I close Dragonfly. I experienced that on Opera 11.50 frequently. However, it seems fixed extremely after releasing Dragonfly 1.1 and Opera 11.51. I fear that Opera crashes when I refresh a web page using Dragonfly. These situations can be considerable as major bugs of Dragonfly.

Must be fixed with Opera 12 alpha because I haven't had that happen when I use Dragonfly and Opera. (Fedora 15 i686 Xfce)

It's looking better, and works great. I've used developer tools for Chrome, and IE9, and instantly miss Dragonfly...Used it the other day to see if Dragonfly wasn't catching something, since it worked in Opera, but those two browsers had troubles.
Dragonfly by far is the best as far as I can tell, excellent work!
Martin KadlecThursday, October 6, 2011 8:42:11 PM
There is "promptdialogcheckdone" attribute on body element on every site (in Opera dragonfly DOM inspector). Is that intention?
Patrick H. LaukeThursday, October 6, 2011 8:53:55 PM
I don't see that particular attribute (using Opera.Next). Could it be that it's an extension you may be running that's injecting that?
Martin KadlecThursday, October 6, 2011 9:24:35 PM
yep, it seems that the problem is "FastestTube" extension. I wonder why it affects other sites than youtube
Patrick H. LaukeThursday, October 6, 2011 9:33:33 PM
Quite possibly the extension writer just took a shortcut...rather than testing if the site in question is actually YouTube, it just injects the attribute into all body elements it can find. Glad my hunch was correct
setThursday, October 6, 2011 10:02:11 PM
Right pane (and the above buttons) don't seem to move to the center (just get cut off) if the window is too small and restored, this was happening a while ago but was fixed, now started again, could be from this build or some previous.. I'm on the experimental.
John A. Bilicki IIIFriday, October 7, 2011 1:50:51 AM
Cool though I'd really like icons with text labels to the right. Having to move the cursor around and wait for title text to decide to appear is deathly slow compared to having text labels available like the main buttons above.
dacuanFriday, October 7, 2011 7:24:28 AM
Great skin improvements!
metudeFriday, October 7, 2011 9:38:20 PM
Unregistered userSaturday, October 8, 2011 8:30:44 AM
cousin333 writes: The latest version (DF b5022) has severe issues with the latest Opera snapshot (b1085). For example expanding DOM tree button does not work at all, and expanding various nodes manually creates funny errors all over the place. It seems sometimes it steps into the node instead of just expanding it.
Unregistered userSaturday, October 8, 2011 8:34:40 AM
cousin333 writes: Anyway, the changes look nice. Any chance to have Dragonfly UI become skin-able? It would be also nice, if DF would remember more settings (like the statistic sending switch, the CSS filter switch or the font size) between releases.
Vlad SalingMonday, October 10, 2011 9:17:16 AM
Like that very much
Martin RauscherTuesday, October 11, 2011 4:48:16 PM
When will we get pretty printing for JS and CSS? That's really a must have...