Unfortunately, I don’t know if it is me or am I just not getting it - but I found the new Dragonfly developer tool for Opera quite unusable.

Firstly, Dragonfly is in a separate window and I could not work out how to integrate the window of my site and Dragonfly debugger.  The layout of Dragonfly and the whole feel of it is probably quite cool and it has some nice features like showing the code in a site tree style layout but without the two windows being integrated I couldn’t see the point.

Secondly, I could not seem to edit anything in the HTML or CSS in the debugger.  This for me is one of the greatest joys of Firebug, I can change the colour of a font, or the typeset or the size of a heading and see exactly what it looks like for the whole site.  It’s great for those last few yards when you want to make sure everything lines up nicely or just try a few little tweaks.  The only thing I have ever wanted more of Firebug is if it linked to FTP and SVN so that changes you made in the browser could be committed to the site development for real.

As I said perhaps I am missing something, as Firebug is so intuitive that it is not something that you read the manual for.  In fact, in some cases we have even shown our clients how to use Firebug so that if they have an error while entering content and building up a new site they can go to the console copy the error and send it through to us.  Makes debugging the exact problem 100 times faster.

It is expected that when Internet Explorer 8 comes out sooner than later it also will include a developer tool such as Firebug and Dragonfly.  I hope for their sake it is at least integrated into the browser and has the ability to edit the code on the fly.