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Opera Employee Hints at Secret Dragonfly Project

Opera’s David Storey, who lists his job title as “Chief Web Opener”, posted an intriguing entry on his blog where he hints at a supersecret project in the works, codenamed Dragonfly:

So what exactly is Opera Dragonfly? I won’t say quite yet, but I do think that, in my opinion, it is the most important project we have on going at the moment, and probably since I’ve been at the company. It won’t directly affect everybody, but will hopefully become invaluable for those that it does. We’ll likely have more to say about it at SXSW in Austin Texas.

Just to make things even more mysterious, the post has now been removed from his blog. Just for the heck of it, I’m going to speculate that Dragonfly is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform in the mold of Adobe AIR or Mozilla Prism. Considering Opera’s well-documented devotion to web standards, the product (if I’m right) will likely enable users to run standard web applications in their own operating system process, rather than offering its own markup and programming language like AIR or Microsoft’s Silverlight. How it will differentiate itself from Prism, which has similar goals, is anyone’s guess at this point.

David’s post linked to a photo of a slick-looking brochure for the product (the “Dragonflyer”, as he terms it). Whatever the product turns out to be, it’s a safe bet that Opera is investing serious resources into it, so if it is a development platform, it may well include a full-blown development environment of some sort, similar to Adobe’s Flex Builder (something that Prism is currently lacking). I pointed out the other day that Opera is stuck between a rock and a hard place in the consumer browser market, so it would be fantastic to see them respond with something innovative and game-changing. The suspense is killing me, but if we believe the text on the brochure (”Coming soon 2008″) we’ll only have to wait ten more months, at worst, to find out what they’re up to.

Update: A commenter notes that David’s post was not removed, just renamed. So much for my future career as the Matt Drudge of the web browsing space. Come on Opera, you should eighty-six the post for real! Cloak-and-dagger theatrics make for great publicity, after all.

Update: A couple of theories that Dragonfly is a web developer debugging tool along the lines of Firebug. This is a lot more convincing than my own speculation; in fact, it seems darn near certain to be correct in retrospect. Firebug is a big deal for Mozilla because it runs only in Firefox and helps differentiate it from other browsers. I’ve even heard web developers comment that they prefer some other browser for normal use but switch to Firefox when developing so they can use Firebug. For attracting developers, at least, Dragonfly would therefore be a great asset for Opera.