Tabbed Browsing

I am new to Opera. One thing I notice is that when I open something in a new tab, the screen immediately switches to the new tab. My style of browsing is to open up 8-10 new tabs with stuff I'd like to read and then MANUALLY switch over to the tabs one by one. I would like tabs to open in the background, not be forced to view them immediately. This is available in Firefox but I cannot figure out how to do this in Opera.