Tweak

There have been a lot of new people in the Forums lately, talking enthusiastically about their switch to Opera. These are people not easily sold on Opera - it took the removal of the ad banner before they even wanted to consider it. So, this is very good news! But some of their comments make it clear, that people switching from tabbed browsers (Firefox, Safari, and in the future IE7) have expectations about how a browser should behave - and Opera is sometimes failing in ways that should be easy to fix.

This is a long introduction to announce a change we want to try out in the upcoming (RSN!) Merlin preview: making Opera's terminology and shortcuts compatabible with 'the other browsers'. So, the word 'Page' is replaced by 'Tab' to describe child windows, for example in 'Tab bar', 'New tab', 'Open in new tab'. At the same time, Merlin introduces the shortcut Ctrl+T (Cmd+T on Mac) to get a new one. Using T for Tab makes it possible for switchers coming from Firefox, Safari, Camino, iCab, Konqueror, and IE 7 to feel right at home from the start. Ctrl+N will now always open a new application window (for the same instance of Opera, such a new window doesn't mean that Opera is started again).

Now, Ctrl+T was already used in Opera to open the 'Bookmark this page' dialog, so that has to change as well. But this is easily solved by using Ctrl+D for bookmarking - another shortcut many switchers were missing. This leads to the last change: the function 'Paste and go' will now take over the Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut (a variant of the Ctrl+V 'paste' shortcut) Ctrl+B shortcut.

There are currently no changes planned in the actual operation of Opera - so removing the close button from the tabs will still give you the pure MDI, beloved by many, etc. To get back to the pre-Opera 8 MDI behavior of 'tabs', there are now several settings available in Preferences > Advanced > Tabs and Preferences > Advanced > Browsing. And Opera is of course doing a lot more in Merlin, apart from changing a word and a few shortcuts! Support for new standards, some interesting new goodies for advanced users, lots of fixes to make us more compatible with websites and standards, etc.


The tweakers among us might go back to the old shortcuts, if they like:

1. Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Shortcuts
2. Doubleclick the 'Opera Standard' keyboard setup
3. Type 'n ctrl' in the quick find field
4. Doubleclick 'New browser window' and type 'New page'
5. Type 't ctrl' in the quick find field
6. Delete the 'new page,1' entry
7. Type 'd ctrl' in the quick find field
8. Change the 'd' in 'd ctrl' and 'd ctrl shift' entries to 't'
9. Type 'b ctrl' in the quick find field
10. Change the 'b' in 'b ctrl' and 'b ctrl shift' entries to 'd'
11. Click OK, click OK

Those that do not want to tweak can also download these automatically installing keyboard shortcut files to get the previous defaults back:

• Eight (includes only the changes as detailed above)
• Seven Five (includes golden oldies like 'Ctrl+G' for User mode and 'P' for print preview)

Edit 2007-04-17: get updated versions for Opera 9.2