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Opera has just released a competing set of developer tools called Dragonfly. They will be automatically included in Opera 9.5 beta 2 and newer versions of the browser, and you will be able to enable them by going to “Tools > Advanced > Developer Tools”.

For web developers, and especially front-end coders, the Firefox extension Firebug by Facebook’s Joe Hewitt is a killer app and major time saver.
But now the Norwegian software maker is highlighting several innovative features of Dragonfly that could give it a leg up on Firebug, all depending on how well they work.

Dragonfly has been released as open source under the BSD license. Microsoft announced at MIX that it is also worked on a set of developer tools for Internet Explorer 8, still in early beta.

Some of Dragonfly features are:

• Ability to debug web pages whether they’re on computer or any remote device, like a cellphone
• In terms of Javascript it will also show the most up-to-date document object model (DOM) of a page, not just its initial construction
• JavaScript debugger will let you diagnose errors on a line-by-line basis.
• Effects of dynamic changes to a web page, whether Ajax-driven or not, will be much more transparent and traceable.

Dragonfly will only be available for Opera, certainly not one of the most widespread browsers, and it won’t initially support in-browser edits to CSS styles. This latter shortcoming is a big one since CSS editing constitutes perhaps the most useful feature of Firebug.