Posts tagged with "opera"
Monday, 28. April 2008, 23:15:56
setup, opera, ribbon, customization
...
[edit 2008-06-15]Updates updated: made the setups offered here compatible with 9.5 Final. Same URLs, a few new versions.I'm going from light blogging to no blogging apparently... a bad trend. I'm a little bit active on Twitter now, but not in a way that compares to my past blogging here. When 9.5 Final and Firefox 3 get released, I'll probably make an update for the Top 150 Extensions list.
But my customized setups can already use some updates, the 9.2 versions will have some broken functionality when used with Kestrel builds. So here are provisional 9.5-compatible setups, suitable for Kestrel Beta 2. Copying some description text from a blog post in April 2007 BTW
Below you can find the auto-install links, with links to old blog posts for some background info. Remember: use
Ctrl+F12 > Advanced > Toolbars to get back to your previous menus, shortcuts and toolbars.
TwelveRibbon-inspired radical setup. Use the menu and toolbar together. Hide the main menu with Alt+F11 after tweaking the shortcuts.
HuginMail-only setup. Use at least the menu and toolbar together.
More Mail Sort of a Hugin-lite that adds more mail-specific menus, shortcuts and buttons, but doesn't remove the browsing functionality. Use at least the menu and toolbar together.
Bigger MenusJust what it says.
Classic ClutterReturn to the toolbar-bonanza of Opera 7.23. With an additional Startbar even...
My Personal Setup Use at least the menu and toolbar together.
Friday, 7. September 2007, 10:49:56
opera, customization, tweak, kestrel
...
Mitchman, Opera developer, explains
some of the new toys for tweakers in Kestrel. It will be interesting see what new shortcuts and buttons will be made with the 'delay' action.
Tuesday, 4. September 2007, 08:52:41
opera, configuration, usability, kestrel
...
Yippee, Kestrel's finally out. As buggy alpha for now, remember! You are best of testing this in a seperate installation, installing in a new directory does that trick. If you decide to upgrade, you really want to have a backup of mail (and bookmarks, wand, cookies etc if these are important for you).
Among many else, this release aims to become more usable out of the box. That means no surprising non-obvious shortcuts where you need to read the documentation to figure out how to get your normal browser back after pressing the wrong key by accident. Yes, this did happen. Quite a lot. Our Elektrans testers made it very clear that power users will dearly miss some of the one-key shortcuts like 1/2 for tab switching and z/x for navigation. So we've also thought of a way to ship with those power shortcuts in a forward-compatible manner (shipping with an extra 'classic' keyboard setup will bring problems for us later). You can find the new switch to turn these shortcuts on under 'Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Shortcuts'.
Now, what changes did we make, and why? There's a complete official list of changes available (edit: updated the link to point to the beta 2 version). And here's a list of reasons:
- Several keyboard shortcuts have been changed or added for better cross-browser compatability.
- All single letter and single number keyboard shortcuts have been removed. These one-key shortcuts are powerful, but also caused serious problems for many users. For most of them alternatives are available. They can also be switched on separately in the Preferences.
- All Shift+letter and Shift+number keyboard shortcuts have been changed or removed for the same reasons.
- All Alt+letter keyboard shortcuts have been changed or removed. These keyboard shortcuts are not compatible with many Opera localizations, because Alt+letter is used to access the main menu. Exceptions: Alt+P and the new Alt+D, both available for historical reasons. Preferred alternatives are available for the actions they perform.
- All Ctrl+Alt+letter keyboard shortcuts have been changed or removed. Windows user interface guidelines reserve these shortcuts for system wide use and as alternative input method for some keyboards.
- Keyboard shortcuts for seldomly used features have been removed, including two series of shortcuts that didn't show in the normal user interface: Ctrl+Shift+number shortcuts for 'manage' pages and Site Navigation keyboard shortcuts (think
<link rel=home ...>)
- Duplicated keyboard shortcuts that served no purpose anymore have been removed, those that were needed for compliance to operating systems guidelines have been made specific for those operating systems.
Monday, 23. July 2007, 21:04:06
opera, features
I've
been tagged,
twice even. The tagging game was started by
Daniel, because we apparently don't have a clue about where to go now, and are not already well on our way with Kestrel and Peregrine development. Or something like that.
Anyway, here's my list:
- Veto rights for me on all UI features
- Buy foobar2000 and Total Commander, and give them a Quick based user interface. That way I can use my leet Quick tweaking skills to change shortcuts and toolbars, instead of painfully having to master their systems.
- Moving the desktop team to a new base in Wijk bij Duurstede, The Netherlands. There is still some space to let over here.
- Some userscript enhancement that lets me send Jack Bauer to all site owners that don't test their work in Opera.
- A pony.
And the tag stops here, I
don't like tagging games. Otherwise I would have tagged
Eric Meyer .
Friday, 1. June 2007, 10:39:16
opera, users, life, wii
...
Wednesday, 18. April 2007, 22:49:23
setup, opera, me, customization
...
You are all wondering what setup I use
myself of course. Not so easy to answer, because I use several installations of Opera at different machines!
- Hugin on the latest Merlin installation for POP (work mail) and IMAP (private mail) and newsgroups and newsfeeds on machine A
- My own custom setup in a Merlin installation for browsing and webwork on machine A
- My own custom setup in a Peregrine installation for browsing, webwork and IRC on machine A
- More Mail in a Merlin installation for IMAP (work mail) and browsing on machine B
- Twelve in a Peregrine installation for browsing, webwork, newsgroups, newsfeeds and IRC on machine B
- And of course usually several versions or Merlin and Peregrine installed at both machines, all kept as default as possible
Machine A is a decent desktop machine with plenty of diskspace, and is the machine I make my backups from. Machine B is a laptop I use for working in whatever room at home I fancy. Total Commander and WLAN make it easy to access my work documents on both. Using both POP and IMAP for accessing the same work mail server isn't perfect, but it works for me.
My custom setup.. is just one of the setups I use then
The menu and toolbar isn't all that spectacular, not anymore. Just some developer and convenience additions to the menu, a few changes here and there, and extra buttons to the Status bar and the View bar. There's
Twelve if I really want different.
The mouse gestures have these two special items:
GestureLeft=Open in background page | Stop | Back | Delete mail | Close page | View Hotlist, 0
GestureRight=Open link in new page | FastForward | Forward | Reload | Mark mail as read | View Hotlist, 7 | Reopen page
The keyboard shortcuts contain all the extra's for More Mail, plus some additions and removals to the other sections. After stripping out the shortcuts that didn't change, this is left of the file:
delta-rijk_keyboard_900.txt Note: it is not a complete setup file after this stripping.
Tuesday, 17. April 2007, 09:05:54
setup, opera, merlin, firefox
...
We've been rather busy with getting 9.2 out of the door, its been over a month since I last posted! To commemorate that release, I've updated all my custom setups.
Here you can find all the auto-install links, with links to old blog posts for some background info. Remember: use
Ctrl+F12 > Advanced > Toolbars to get back to your previous menus and toolbars.
TwelveRibbon-inspired radical setup. Use the menu and toolbar together. Hide the main menu with Alt+F11 after tweaking the shortcuts.
HuginMail-only setup. Very minor update. Use at least the menu and toolbar together.
More Mail Sort of a Hugin-lite that adds more mail-specific menus, shortcuts and buttons, but doesn't remove the browsing functionality. Use at least the menu and toolbar together.
Bigger MenusJust what it says.
OperaFoxFirefox lookalike. Menu and toolbar updated to be more like FF 2.0. Use at least the menu and toolbar together.
Opera ExplorerIE6-lookalike, minor update. Not really recommended - an IE7 lookalike would be better
Use at least the menu and toolbar together.
Seven-FiveReturn to the looks and shortcuts of Opera 7.5.
EightReturn to the keyboard shortcuts of Opera 8.0.
KISSOpera setup for partners and parents. The updated KISS below is even simpler than the one described at the link above.
Classic ClutterReturn to the toolbar-bonanza of Opera 7.23. Now with Startbar as well..
Single lineOne toolbar for menu, navigation and status field. Hide the menu with Alt+F11 after tweaking the shortcuts.
About-this-siteExtension for the document page context menu.
Sunday, 4. February 2007, 17:26:09
opera, opera9, customization, screenshot
...
After
Hugin, here's the 9.x update for Munin. But it's now called OperaFox. Munin was
originally designed as a simplified Opera, inspired by Firefox. But since Opera 8, the default Opera setup is already simplified and hides the mail stuff etc. So while I still use Hugin myself, I don't use Munin anymore.
OperaFox 0.9For those who like the Firefox experience, here's a setup that tries to mimic the Firefox look and feel. You can even download a keyboard shortcuts setup that makes Opera behave just like Firefox/MSIE (at the cost of making some Opera-specific shortcuts more complex). The toolbar and menu should both the installed for this setup to work correctly. The shortcuts are optional. The nice skin using Firefox and Thunderbird icons was made by
Ralf Demuth.
Edit 2007-04-17: the links point to 9.2-compatible setups now
Monday, 22. January 2007, 23:58:50
opera, screenshot, browsers, css
David Storey, our head web opener, has posted about the upcoming support for 'Selectors' (that is, CSS 3 Selectors) in Peregrine, the codename for the next big update of Opera (current 9.x series is codenamed Merlin). He also mentioned support for the 'text-shadow' property.
'text-shadow' has been dropped from CSS 2.1 because there were not enough implementations, basically it was just Safari (and other webkit-based Mac browsers) for a long time. Later iCab (a non-webkit Mac-browser) also added support, as well as Konqueror. Now, our developers also found a way to implement it.
Here's how text-shadow in Peregrine looks like on my
Panelizer pages:
Note that I don't really like the 'pure' text-shadows, but I very much appreciate the blur effect. Using a little blur on :hover is also nice as a link-indicator I think - but there is no mechanism in CSS to fallback to another :hover style if text-shadow is not supported, which might make this use a bit problematic.
Our implementation seems to be quite good:
- support for multiple shadows
- limits to be maximum blur value - you can seriously hurt performance of some other browsers with big blur values
Thursday, 4. January 2007, 02:23:37
opera, marketing
Hi Opera fans,
Please answer Lawmune's
question for the new year. I think it is a good question where the marketing people can use some input from you.
Wednesday, 20. December 2006, 15:53:14
OLPC, opera, browsers
Opera runs on the OLPC. Cool! A lot of the discussion on
Slashdot and
Digg was about the open-source requirements for
OLPC, which would make it impossible to ship with Opera.
I really wonder how the OLPC users would go about changing the source and recompiling the Gecko-derivative (it is not Firefox) on this cute little box. Wasn't it also supposed to be safe and tamperproof? And if they can change and recompile the gecko-browser, they could also install it separately if Opera would be shipped with the box [1]. So what opportunuties are lost? What am I missing?
[1] Assuming that the targeted children (this thing is not designed for adult geeks, though it hopes to create some young geeks along the way) have access to the know-how and systems to compile this software, and are interested in this. And also assuming that the HTML-based stuff created for this box will be standards-based, not tailored to proprietary extensions of any browser.
Tuesday, 19. December 2006, 08:54:30
opera, opera9, firefox, anti-phish
...
Asa's blog postings didn't get much comments recently (not that many people interested in space exploration, and it will be some months before FF3 gets interesting), so he
posted about Opera 9.10. Even though he wasn't offensive, he's still accused of baiting Opera fans
On the substance: it will indeed be interesting to see if independent studies will detect differences in protection level between the new browsers, because the three browsers have very different implementations!
IE 7: asks you to enable anti-phishing on first start, uses (IIANM) both heuristics and a whitelist in the browser, and callbacks to servers in Redmont. The latter could be problematic, not everyone trusts Microsoft with their browsing history...
FF 2: doesn't ask, but enables blacklisting with regularly (every hour) downloaded blacklists. Might give OK results if the quality of their blacklists is good, but the timing is important. You can enable real-time fraudchecks using a Google service, but that requires clicking 'OK' on a dialog that tells you Google will store your browsing history... The testing they did
themselves show a slight increase in effectiveness after enabling this.
Opera 9.1: doesn't ask, but gives an easy way to check the status of individual sites (if you are curious enough to click the '?' in the address field, you'll find this option). You can enable real-time checking from this dialog (and from the Preferences), where Opera doesn't asks you click 'OK' on a big warning dialog, because there is nothing to want about. Opera doesn't store your browsing information or cookies or IP addresses etc. The only thing the Opera sitecheck server remembers will be what sites the collective Opera users have asked for in the past few days. There is the
full documentation available.
Recent research has shown that many phishing scams operate only for a few dozen hours, presumably making most of their victims in the first hours. So it makes sense to use real-time checking against regularly updated servers. None of the tested services get a perfect score, though there are certainly differences. Opera hopes that combining the GeoTrust and PhishTank databases will give at least as good results for our users.
I encourage everyone to register an account on PhishTank, and spend a few minutes every week in verifying suspected phish sites. And I also encourage everyone to install Opera 9.10 for their less websavvy friends and relatives, and enable fraud protection for them!
Monday, 18. December 2006, 15:16:38
opera, opera9, configuration, customization
...
Yippee,
9.10 is final. High time to update the downloadable custom setups I've made. I'll try to get this working with my.opera.com's system later, but for now I'll use my own webspace. First one:
Hugin 2.5Hugin is a custom setup for a dedicated Mail & Chat client. It makes the power of M2 visible in menus and shortcuts and button - and makes it possible to keep mail and browsing separate processes, which has pros and cons. Normal browser functionality is mostly removed, so create a separate Opera installation for this one. You can open weblinks in a simple web tab. But you can also open them in your normal browser installation, with the link context menu. The toolbar and menu should both the installed for this setup to work!
Edit 2007-04-17: the links point to 9.2-compatible setups now
Friday, 1. December 2006, 10:22:07
love, mobile, mini, opera
I'm subscribed to search-feeds on Technorati and Digg for the words 'opera browser'. The last few days, there has been a large number of search results of course, mostly hailing the arrival of Opera Mini 3.0. Non-English blog entries seem to dominate. I can't read Korean, but with a title of
Opera Mini, ★★★★★! it must be a positive review
Thursday, 2. November 2006, 22:57:54
opera, mini, mobile
Here's another Opera Mini enthousiast:
Opera Mini 2 Opens Up Real Mobile Web Browsing. Opera Mini is a good reason to see if you can get a reasonably priced data plan for your mobile phone. I can't remember reading anything but enthousiastic reviews about Opera Mini. And
Mini 3.0 will be even more useful, with RSS support, secure connections and better connectivity. I knew this was going to be a great app, the first time I used it, spring 2005
In other news:
dev.opera has launched, Opera's new website that reaches out to web developers worldwide. Feedback is
welcome. What articles would you like to see?
Monday, 30. October 2006, 00:36:57
opera
There is a lot of info available on the Opera browser - in a lot of different places. Like the forums and blogs at my.opera, at the official opera.com site, at operawiki.info, in the opera.* newsgroups, etc. So when I read about the 'Google Co-op Custom Search Engine', this seemed like a great way to aggregate these sources and let Google do its magic.
Here is the result:
Opera Browser Info. Tell me what you think; is this useful? Any important source of info on Opera obviously missing?
Saturday, 28. October 2006, 22:04:43
opera, firefox
Just back from a few days off in a well-preserved
old part of Belgium, so hundreds of newsfeed postings awaited me this evening, providing some entertainment. One was a bit strange:
Asa explained that they refer to 'Firefox 2' when promoting the new release, and in the comments people expressed surprise at this 'move'. I'm not surprised at all though. We are doing exactly the same with Opera. We promote 'Opera 9', not 'Opera 9.0' (and certainly not 'Opera 9.0.2'). The big number jumps are the time to showcase and advertise new functionality.
Talking about '2.0' or '9.0' is bad because
- it is geeky, and
- you'll have to do the artwork again, and
- you can't focus the message enough.
BTW: we might
get a 9.1 release soon, which of course muddles the message somewhat
Tuesday, 17. October 2006, 16:26:42
opera, customize, userstyle, screenshot
Electoral Vote is an great site that aggregates all the known polls in the US Presidential and Senate elections (made by a well known American geek, who happens to live in The Netherlands). The result: a nice red-and-blue map of the States. Unfortunately, the alignment, fonts and heavy HRs make it look rather unappealing. As I intend to follow the site for quite a while again (also did this during the Bush/Kerry battle), it was worthwhile to invest some time in making a userstylesheet to improve the looks.
Before:
After:
I've modified a copy of the site stylesheet. The changes are not very extensive, but that's OK because the site layout isn't very fancy anyway :-) Couldn't change the background color, because it is ugly if this doesn't match the background color in the automatically generated images. But I prefer to read text in
Cambria. I've also made the fat horizontal rules invisible, and added some thin borders instead.
Here's the stylesheet:
electoral-vote.cssOh, and this is the current polling result:
Sunday, 15. October 2006, 23:09:56
opera, userscript, customization
These are the userscripts I currently have running in my 'normal' browser installation:
- Autosizer activates when you use Opera to view an image file, and adds five different viewing modes for images: original, shrink to fit, maximize, fit to width, fit to height. Prime candidate to turn into a built-in feature, if you ask me.
- Google Suggest will add the autocomplete feature from Google Suggest to regular Google search pages. Sometimes helpful, sometimes interferes with entering text.
- Google Thumbnails adds web site thumbnail images to google search results. A bit of harmless fluff (unless you're on dialup), but the thumbs are not always relevant because they depict only the server homepage. This is offered as a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, but it works out-of-the box in Opera as well.
- Linkify text files improves display of text files by making URLs in text documents clickable. Also adds line numbers when you want. To make lines wrap, press Ctrl+F11 (Fit-to-width).
- MyOpera Community Forum Enhancements is a suite of toys that improve various tasks at the MyOpera forums, such as showing attachments inline and adding page numbers.
- Operapedia shows you a relevant Wikipedia article along with your search results. Adds links in the article which will trigger new Google searches. This script needs updates frequently, when either Google or Wikipedia make a little change to their site.
- PageRank userscript gives proper formatting for Andrew's PageRank popup button.
- XML tree displays the XML tree for XML documents without style, making it a useful tool for analysing XML files. Also something we could use built-in IMHO.
Inactive scripts, used to be active in my Opera installation:
- Operafy Asa's blog mangles Asa's blog in a funny way, but makes it harder to read.
- No Click to Activate works around the new 'Click to activate' plugin handling. It caused problems reading PDFs for me.
- Link Alert displays icons beside links to specific file types or actions. Nifty. But I rarely need the info, while the icons always show.
- Enhance blockquotes adds clickable links when a blockquote uses the cite attribute, and the blockquote doesn't already contain a clickable link to the cited work. Alas, I don't see many properly marked-up blockquotes on the web. The script recently seemed to mess up an important website, and I saw no reason to keep it.
Thursday, 12. October 2006, 09:39:45
screenshot, opera
QA staff had a teambuilding activity today. Our bugs could rest, no hunting this afternoon. A handful of QA staff are not located in Oslo and work mostly from home. We've been invited to participate in this activity by making a little quiz. Three of us each made three questions, and we would give the various teams clues for the next part of their challenge only after answering the questions correctly.
A somewhat predictable problem came up: we were too enthousiastic in making difficult questions, and the organisers were too optimistic in their planning. IOW, we had to relax out rules a bit because otherwise they wouldn't get to the 'eat pizza together' part of the activity before midnight
.
Here are the questions I gave them:
- Which three boroughs merged a few years ago to become my current resident borough, and when?
- What music do I listen to while working? Specifically, today?
- What browser is Opera mimicking here?
Congratulations to Joen's team for being the only team to answer all three questions correctly!
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