So it's pretty much the same as firebug?

Will be interested to see what this is like as I rely heavily on the truly superb Firebug in Firefox for these kind of features currently. If it's even just 'as good' as Firebug it'll be fantastic.

Whenever I have to view a site in IE for test purposes I always feel like I've slipped back into the early 1400's technology-wise when I want to find out why a webpage doesn't behave in Exploder.

Still M$ assures us that IE8 will be perfect; a work of technical standards-adherent art that will exude beauty and put all other browsers to shame.

I believe them absolutely. After all with near infinite money and resources they'd be idiotically incompetent if they couldn't achieve that.

Oh. Hang on...

Well firefox ripped off everything Opera does, so fair game, some of it goes the other way :D

This is very early in development and doesn't have all the planned features yet, apparently.

And it can do remote debugging so you can debug sites on your phone. I don't think Firebug has that.

Also, it seems to crash less than Firebug :D

Can do everything Firebug can, and more, including debugging remote devices like Opera Mobile.

Very nice.

Yet again, Opera leads, everyone else follows..

I must be terribly dense, but what on Earth is this "remote debugging" about, and what is the advantage?

I'll take a guess that your desktop Opera somehow connects to the phone (wifi/Bluetooth or so...?) while it's browsing a page and gets ferried the information. Or does the data get bounced off Opera's servers, like everything you browse in Opera Mini? More explanation would be welcome.

I like the idea, but I'd sooner have an emulated phone setup on my desktop to work with (used to do this with the Sun J2ME SDK), otherwise you'll still be doing a lot of pissing about with fiddly buttons just to use the browser on the phone.

The dev tools will be very welcome anyway. Firefox has Firebug, Web Developer and many other, lesser but useful, extensions. IE even has the Developer Toolbar, though this would be much more valuable if it told you _why_ the DOM was behaving with the insanity of bat ordure... Now all we need is Safari or another WebKit-flavoured browser to float a similar offering and I will be a happy bunny.

The basic idea is that Opera has built a protocol called Scope for communicating with the browser process, getting the DOM information, etc. This protocol is now built into the Opera core, so it can be connected to from remote machines by TCP/IP. So your first guess was correct.

It also means that if other browsers develop Scope server add-ons, you will be able to debug all of them with one tool.