IceArdor's Blog

One of these days, phones will have a "10" and an "11" button to save you the two strokes it takes to make each of these numbers. Until then, you can expand your Speeddial to be larger (or smaller) than 3x3. This is particularly helpful for people with widescreen displays or massive resolution.

To increase your speeddialage, close Opera, open up your speeddial.ini file (located in your profile directory), append the code below to your speeddial.ini, save, close, and open Opera again.

[Size]
Rows=3
Columns=4

Thanks to larskl for posting about this feature.

I received my goodie bag in the mail from Opera yesterday from Espen.

My submission was Trimet Transit Tracker, which is the first widget I have ever done. Thanks for the encouragement, Opera. It is definately beta quality, still strongly resembles the Hello World example. Nonetheless, I hope to teach myself a little Javascript so I can extract just the content I need from a web script. Really, all the credit goes to Trimet for making their Transit Tracker program. I simply iframe'd it, figureing it'd make it one step easier to look up departure and arrival times. For all you people living in New York, London, and Japan, I am really jealous that you have 24/7 transit and don't have to worry about missing a bus or train. The closest stop to my house comes at best every 45, and on Sundays every 90 minutes.

Ultimately, this widget will be really useful for quickly knowing what time to catch the bus in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Enough about what I did. Here's what was in the goodie bag:

• 2 red Opera pens
  
• Black Opera + Widgets t-shirt (similar design to the koozies at SXSW)
  
• browse me shirt (from the Rock Opera party back in October)
  
• Opera lanyard
  
• Hand signed note from Espen (these notes really mean a lot to me because it lets me know that cool humans work at Opera, and that the magic of Opera isn't just done by robots or monkeys)
  

Opera, You-Guys-Are-Amazing!

Opera has a good reason why not to adopt Extensions. That's Firefox's child, and anyone who can't live without them can use Firefox. Of course, in doing so, they'd be opening up their computer to greater security risks, adopting a more memory- and CPU-intensive browser, and give up the extreme customizability of Opera. But Opera isn't playing its game as strong as it could be.

Yes, Widgets are great and all, but they alone can't compete with Extensions. What if you want a button right in Opera's interface for downloading a video from YouTube? Yes, the Video Downloader widget will work, but either you've got to keep it open all the time, or open it up, copy-paste the url, etc. This just isn't as convenient.

Opera already has this capability built in via Bookmarklets. Opera needs to leverage all of their customization features and make them easier to use. They've done a great job so far. Remember filter.ini, search.ini, and ua.ini? With Opera 9, all of that is can be controlled graphically—without restarting (try that on, Firefox!). Opera extended ua.ini to allow site-specific preferences that is unprecedented in the browser industry. Opera's Content Blocker makes ad-hunting a little bit easier. Search.ini was also made easier with the search engine editor and Create Search from the context menu. With the addition of the brand-new opera:config page, customization got even easier.

Opera's also built a nice keyboard shortcut editor and a mouse gesture editor that goes undiscovered for many people. Maybe the development team could think about how to make these more useful, like teaching a user mouse gestures or keyboard shortcuts that are likely useful to them based on their browsing habits and what shortcuts they use already. I'm glad that recent weeklies of Kestrel include a 9.2-compatible keyboard shortcut mode as well as the new 9.5-compatible mode. Avoid breaking backwards compatibility, and give your users choices. Firefox keeps two stable branches in development (1.5.x and 2.0.x), and this is the first step Opera can take to giving its users the choice of upgrading. It'd also be nice to merge changes made to a customized keyboard shortcut setup with new versions of Opera. When Speeddial came out and Ctrl+[1..9] was added, I lacked those shortcuts because I had a customized keyboard setup. I eventually abandoned my customized keyboard setup so I could get speeddial to work properly. To this day, I still don't know what customizations I had when I upgraded to the new shortcuts.

Ever since I've been using Opera, I have been able to move any button anywhere, any toolbar anywhere. There are tons of buttons and search fields available from within Opera, as well. Compare this to Firefox, which won't let you move the address bar below the tab bar, where it rightfully belongs (even though Asa agrees that it should belong there, but Firefox is trying to create uniformity with IE7, and so is locking the address bar illogically above the tabs). Firefox allows some buttons to be moved around, but the toolbars are locked in place. For being the lightweight, customizable browser that it claims to be, I think Mozilla has some false claims they need to check on.

Anyways, back to Opera. Opera needs to improve its graphical controls for UserCSS and UserJS, just like it improved the tools for search.ini and filter.ini. Opera needs to brag about its UserJS and UserCSS, and make them JUST as powerful as widgets. Why? They compete with greasemonkey, which is an absolute necessity for many Firefox power users. Furthermore, the power of UserJS and UserCSS needs to be opened up to the common user, but this can only be accomplished once a graphical method of adding UserJS and managing installed UserJS right inside of Opera is done.

By the way, what ever happened to userjs.org??? Opera had a good thing going for itself before widgets took off, and then just abandoned one of its projects. In order to compete with extensions, Opera needs all of these extendible tools.

Opera needs to leverage these tools together:

• Widgets
  
• UserJS and UserCSS
  
• Native Spellchecker (or install Aspell with Opera)
  
• tools for discovering, creating, and managing Bookmarklets.
  
• tools that unlock Opera's power by allowing users to create Custom Commands from within the browser. Add this to Opera's interface, maybe?
  
• Content Blocker
  
• opera:config
  
• Customizable button and toolbar placement
  
• Search engines
  
• Site-specific preferences
  
• Skins (for those Firefox Theme-lovers)
  
• Keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures
  

This is what makes Opera the versatile tool that it is. Some of these items need to have their graphical accessability and managability improved. Some need a little touch-up paint, and some are already done. And Opera already has a great thing going for it: you won't have to restart your browser for a single one of these to take effect.

With the web developer tools on their way for Peregrine, this is Opera's opportunity to improve everything in one package that really screams Opera's extensibility.

I stumbled across this today on the forums, and figured everyone deserves a little resizing magic. Install this in your UserJS directory, and make sure you have UserJS enabled.

Download textarea-drag-resizer.js

It's a nice substitute for Safari's draggable input fields. So really, what does Safari have over Opera now???

Back in January, Daniel asked the community "How would an Opera “Web 2.0″ logo look like?" Here's my answer, that I have waited until now to post.



And here's the wallpaper that goes with it:


I made a package with icons and stuff and posted that on my DeviantArt. I also posted my story about this logo on my DeviantArt page.

A year ago or so someone made a post about the My Opera Community being compared against other bulletin boards out there. I figured not too many boards out there have 1,000,000+ members, so I wanted to re-evaluate how My Opera compared against other boards.

Here's the stats from Big Boards:

• 4th highest number of members for software boards
• 71st highest number of posts for English software boards
• 15th highest number of posts during the last week for English software boards
• 8th highest Alexa ranking for software boards



• 30th highest number of members for all boards
• 1473rd highest number of posts for all boards
• 591st highest number of posts during the last week for all boards
• 36th highest Alexa ranking for all boards

So congrats Opera Community. I wish there was a category on Big Boards for "most helpful members" and "kindest members" because you guys are about as friendly as a bulletin board can get. Often times n00bs are yelled at and made fun of, but I haven't seen a whole lot of that here. Thanks to every one of you.

As FavBrowser said, "It's not enough to have all the greatest features." And I think that's definately true. If Opera wants to gain the marketshare it deserves, it's going to have be equally creative and innovative in coming up with advertising campaigns and ways to sell the browser as it is for coming up with new features like Widgets^9.0, Fraud Protection^9.1, Speed Dial^9.2, Full History Search^9.5, and Synchronization^9.5.

I was at school today using one of the computers which had Firefox and IE7 installed on it. I wanted to test to see how my SVG+JS Timeline of Opera Releases image displayed on other browsers. It's important to be accessible to both js-enabled and js-disabled browsers. I searched through the menus in Firefox and couldn't find a "Disable JavaScript" option. So then I had to plow through Firefox's confusing Options. To this day I still don't understand why Firefox's preferences are set up the way they are. After searching through the Options tabs, I finally found the "Enable JavaScript" checkbox on the Content tab. Disabling JavaScript seems like it could be an Advanced Option, or maybe a Security Option, or maybe a Privacy Option, or a General Option. So if the labels of the tabs don't help you find what you want, why even use labels? Why not just call them "Tab 1" and "Tab 2"? Might I also add that I went searching through Firefox's menus assuming that a browser that claims to be superior for web development would have this elementary option. Do I really need to install a third-party EXTENSION to easily disable JavaScript? I'm sick of using an extension-based browser that doesn't even have the basics.

Final result:

• 6 mouse clicks to disable JavaScript in Firefox. (Tools » Options » Tabs » » Content » uncheck "Enable JavaScript" » OK). 5 mouse clicks if you know where to look
  
• In Internet Explorer, it's it's 8 mouse clicks. (Tools » Internet Options » Security » Custom Level » Scroll through the long list » Disable Active Scripting » OK » OK)
  
• In Opera, it's only 2 mouse clicks. (Tools » uncheck "Enable JavaScript")
  

This is Opera's power. It doesn't just load pages fast, it lets you change settings fast.

Of course, for power users in Opera, they can hit F12 and spend only one mouse-click, or put the JS button in their toolbar, as I have.

For having so few features, you'd think every feature in Firefox would be easily accessible, but it seems that nearly none of them are. In contrast, Opera is filled with bucketloads of features that would require well over 150 Firefox extensions to equate. But it's not just features, it's how accessible they are. And I think that ought to be Opera's selling point. Somehow, nearly every feature in Opera is quickly and logically accessible.

Try finding your way around Firefox with 150+ seperately-developed extensions. Good Luck!

Web Interoperability is important. It means not having to code a website 3 or 4 times just so it can look the way you intend in every web browser. It means not having to learn the different DOMs for web browsers. It means not having to wait for W3 specs to be implemented by everybody. I recently made an SVG image, and I'm sad to say that Internet Exploder can't display it. With the Adobe SVG plugin, it's severely murdered. Firefox doesn't quite "murder" it, but it comes close. Opera does a great job, particularly Kestrel, which is faster and cleaner at displaying the image. Fyrd (ADeveria on Wikipedia) made a wonderful timeline of web browsers that sadly had many people asking "how do I view a higher resolution version of that image" because Wikipedia caches a scaled-down png of the svg image.

This is why it's important for people to know about Opera--so they can see how much potential the web has, and how much you can do with your projects if people have browsers that are interoperable and current with W3 recommendations.

Opera, Safari, Firefox, and Konqueror truly are Interoperable.

And with that, I leave you this wallpaper I made a couple months back. Scale it down to whatever resolution you're using. I would have loved to make this image SVG, but I didn't, so 4000x3200 pixels will have to do. I like Google, and I think they do a great job at tying the web together, so I featured them in the center of this, despite certain features being broken in Opera.

Kestrel isn't just an interim release to keep us hungry for Peregrine. It's the full-blown thing. There's a reason why the Opera Devs are saying "WIR"--because there is some serious changes from Merlin. It's going to be a totally new browser that it almost deserves to be called Opera 10. Nevertheless, here's my list.

1. Hundreds of wishlist items will be included in Kestrel. From manually checking RSS feeds to better CSS support.
   
2. Merlin has its bugs, and we are tired of them. We want new bugs instead. It'll be fun to hunt them down and see what quirky behaviors Opera can do.
   
3. Kestrel is going to be faster.
   
4. M2 is rewritten, and this means that Opera will be even better at handling your feeds, in all likelihood.
   
5. Apart from being a totally new rendering engine, Kestrel will have an improved JavaScript engine. This means faster and more support. Hopefully the SVG engine will be faster, too.
   

I want Opera just as bad as everyone else does, but I'm not about ready to rush the devs to get a release out. I don't want a radioactive build like Safari 3 beta. And I want lots of wishes to be implemented. With as much time as Opera's had, we can expect Kestrel to be amazing. Then again, it's Opera we're talking about. They make nothing but amazing.