Opera Otaku

Every once in awhile, a hot new browser feature will be unveiled for IE, Firefox, etc. and it will stir up a lot of excitement. What's amusing (and sometimes aggravating) to a lot of Opera fans is that Opera often had these features since a long time ago, but few people noticed. It's the curse of being ahead of the times.

Here are a couple of examples:

At the most recent CES, Bill Gates demonstrated Windows Vista, Microsoft's next-generation operating system. During that demonstration, he showed a bit of Internet Explorer 7. We all knew that Microsoft would include tabs in their updated browser, but they also added a special "twist". Reminiscent of the windows management feature found in Mac OS X, it is possible to view the contents of all tabs simultaneously, allowing the user to choose which tabs (out of a large set of tabs) he or she actually wants to visit. It's a pretty neat feature, but after thinking about it a little, I realized Opera can already do something very similar.

With Opera's MDI (multiple document interface) capabilities, it's very easy to tile all open tabs, close the ones you don't want, and then remaximize the windows. With Opera's easy button creation tools, this can all be done at the touch of a button (or you can easily program extra mouse buttons to do the same thing).

[edit (2/1/06): Another aspect of this feature that is fairly unique to Opera is that the tiled windows can actually be used without maximizing them. Meaning, you can scroll through each window, follow links, etc. With Opera's "Fit-to-window-width" option turned on by default, horizontal scrolling can be eliminated or at least greatly reduced in the tiled windows. This is made possible by Opera's Extensible Rendering Architecture]

[edit (2/1/06): In order get "Fit-to-window-width" to be turned on at all times, change the default rendering mode by editing opera6.ini manually or using the opera:config tool in Opera 9 (tp1). See the following links for more info:

constant "fit to window width"

Setting the default rendering mode

Opera's rendering modes

When creating the "tile" and "maximize" buttons, you want to use the "Tile vertically" and "Maximize all" commands, respectively.]

Here's a screenshot:

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I was reading Digg yesterday, and one story that had people talking is a new Firefox extension called X-Ray. According to the story:

The X-Ray Firefox Extension shows you what’s beneath the surface of the page you're viewing. It displays the HTML tags around the content on a webpage, letting you see how the document was constructed without having to go back and forth between the sourcecode and the rendered page in your browser.

That's a really great feature, and the author of the extension deserves full credit for providing it to Firefox users, but before anyone switches from Opera to Firefox because of it, it's important to remember that Opera has had that capability built-in for a very long time.

All you have to do is switch from Author mode to User mode with Show structural elements selected. I use a button to toggle between Author mode and User mode, so it's a snap to switch between normal view and HTML view. If you're using Opera, give it a try.