Giving Opera a helping hand in building cool debugging tools

Talking to the Opera Vikings at several conferences I realized that the little browser that could is doing a lot to help developers get the best out of them. While Firefox+Web Developer Toolbar+Firebug still rules for me as a developing platform, I was always a bit disappointed as to how Opera fell back in this respect. Sure, it always had a good JS console with human readable error messages (hey, Microsoft, hint! hint!) but there is nothing to debug the CSS issues you find. Now Opera want to alleviate that problem and asked several people to give them feedback on what can be done to help JavaScripters and other developers to work with Opera.

Here’s the email I got:

One of the biggest problems with supporting Opera at present is the lack of any meaningful developer tools, especially a JavaScript debugger. Our developers (who as you can imagine are regular programmers, not web developers) are looking into integrating the tools we build into a number of IDEs. I want to make sure we integrate into the right IDE’s and editors that client side JavaScript developers use, instead of just the server side developers.
So I’d like to know (if you’re willing to share) what development environments (or text editor if that is what you use) you use when developing JavaScript. If your colleagues use different tools then that would be useful to know, or if you know tools that are very popular that others use. Do you also know if it is popular for the server side guys to develop the client side logic instead of the client side people, and if they use their typical tools like Eclipse or visual Studio (for example) for this?
Any feedback, wish lists, comments etc would be greatly appreciated as we are looking to build tools that will serve the development community as well as possible. This will obviously be a multi stage project. We probably can’t produce something that has everything Firebug has and more from day one (especially with Yahoo also now committing resources on it), but we will advance the tools as time goes on, with the most needed features addressed first.

So tell me, what do you use? I will point the Norwegians here to get info outside the office and who knows, maybe your submission will make Opera a joy to debug with!

[tags]debugging,IDE,development,opera,firefox,firebug,hornedhelmets,largeblondeladies[/tags]