Electric Ants HQ

A huge list of wishes for the Opera desktop browser.

If you feel you want to comment on them, you'd ideally go to the wishlist and give the topics a push.


Cheap Wishes, Vital Wishes

These are ideas I consider easy to implement.

Favicons for Incomplete Pages
Open only Links next to active page.
After closing a tab, Opera should go to the next unopened tab, not backwards to the previous one!
Spacers and Separation Lines in the Sidebar
Mails dated to the future
Ask before closing tabs with edited forms
Don't show error dialog when failed checking mail
redirect "opera:illegal-url-113" typos to custom search (eg. google)
Remember ALL text typed in forms!!



Page Loading with Adress Typos and Network Problems

Opera needs to change its behaviour when typing an invalid url, or when a page refuses to load. Currently you just get an error page that is quite useless and uninformative. More annoying, you need to re-focus the adress bar to correct what you typed. Sometimes Opera even replaces your adress string with "invalid url" or something like that, so it costs you some extra steps to get your original adress string and correct it.

A comprehensive discussion is found here.
Suggestions and complaints about the process of trying to load a page (by me)

If an url is invalid, Opera should first try some heuristics (as it does already), and then try google. Especially, if the adress contains spaces in between the characters (if the first word doesn't match a search nickname), Opera should always treat it like a google search.
Better handling of inadequate url's (by hemo)
BackSpace for Google Search (by voessli)

If Opera is unable to connect to the desired page, it should display a meaningful error page. An improved error page would have an upper half that is generated on the local machine, with
- an adress field and/or a search field containing your typed-in string, that automatically gets the focus. This is necessary to easily correct typos, or reuse parts of the adress if you changed your mind.
- an information (link) about the adress that is trying to load, and why this doesn't work.
- a statement that Opera will auto-retry to connect every XX seconds, eventually with buttons to give up, force retry, show the cached version.
- some information about cached versions of the page in question.
The lower half of the error page can take more time to load. It contains search results from one or more search entgines, a version from cache, or just the previous page from the respective tab.

Some of these ideas are found in the above thread ("suggestions and complaints"), some are found here.
Improve error page when failed to connect! (by me)



Tab Grouping, Sessions and the Page Trashcan

It frequently happens that users complain about their messy page bar. Not only is a page bar with 49 tabs at 7 rows a waste of screen space, it also becomes impossible to find anything in that big mess.
Most often all these tabs belong to different subjects, and thus a grouping solution would make perfect sense. This grouping should work automatically, so we don't need to waste time rearranging pages.

Currently you can use multiple application windows to work as page groups. However, the only way to keep a good overview of the pages in all windows is Opera's windows panel. Another annoyment - while closed pages can be recovered from the page trashcan, there is no way to undo closing a window - only the last one (or all, if you close the entire app) is stored as a session.

Suggested improvement.
Show closed windows in page trashcan on page bar.

Even then it would be nicer to manage all pages and page groups from an Opera toolbar, instead of switching tasks in the OS, or having to open a panel (I use panels for mail, notes etc, don't want to use it for switching pages).

Here the first step would be to improve the order of tabs in the page bar.
Open only links next to active page

We can construct a graph of pages (tabs), where two pages are connected if one was opened from a link in the other. Mathematically, this graph turns out to be a directed tree, or better, a "directed forest". We get an absolutely natural and useful definition of page groups if we use the connected components of this tree as groups.

Having these page relationships in memory does not change anything for the user. We need to think about ways to display the group relationships, and let the user interact with them.

One prominent suggestion, including a mockup, is floating around in the wishlist for some time now. The tab bar stays as it is (with the above mentioned re-ordering), but the different groups (connected components) are indicated with colors on the tabs, and little spaces between them. See
Window Management - A Proposal (by non-troppo)

Finally, we can think about clearing up the page bar by showing only those pages that belong to the active group. An additional groups toolbar can serve to switch between different groups. A browser that has tab grouping like this is Deepnet Explorer. More advanced solutions are described in
I *need* grouping of pages (by RobbieGee)
Tab grouping mockup (by me)

A different solution is to drop the idea of groups, and instead see the tabs as in a web structure. For each two tabs, we can estimate a "degree of relatedness", or a "semantic distance", or however we call this. Then we can highlight inactive tabs, based on their degree of relatedness to the active tab.
Highlighting of related tabs



Favourite Download Folders, Filesystem Panel and Drag&Drop Downloads

When downloading files with Opera (app installers, images, pdfs, etc), it is often a pain to specify a download folder using the standard WinXP "Save as.." dialog. Opera can help you with filetype-specific download locations, but the folder does not always depend on the filetype.

The save dialog could be improved by providing some shortcuts to frequently used or user-defined download folders.
Download dialog: Recently used folders

A filesystem panel could serve both to save (download) files by drag-and-drop, and to drag files from your filesystem into web forms, emails etc. This panel would contain a tree view of the filesystem, and some user-defined filesystem shortcuts, to quickly make the treeview jump to favourite locations, or to simply drop files there.

Each folder would contain one "virtual" subfolder, named "create folder". If you drop a file there, a new folder will be created, with a name that is auto-generated from the filename, or the link text of the object you just dropped. If you just drag an object on a folder of the filesystem panel, you will get into a recursive menu structure showing the subfolder tree.

Discussion about the filesystem panel.
Filesystem panel

An alternative would be to show the filesystem tree as a dynamic submenu structure from the context menu.


Mouse-sensitive Tree View

The main problem with tree views suddenly folding and unfolding is that it makes the folders below jump up and down. Therefore, the filesystem panel as described above will react on object dragging with popup menus, instead of unfolding the tree view.

Alternatively to this recursive menu structure, we can think about a special mouse-sensitive tree view that does not make the rest of the tree jump. The trick is to display the subfolders on top of the tree view, so you will only see the leftmost part of the containing folder remains visible. This will only apply on those subfolders that are opened temporarily by dragging on them with an object.

Discussion and mockups.
Popup subfolders



Sidebar with multiple Panels, helpful Minipanels

Sometimes it would be nice to let the sidebar display multiple panels at once. However, creating efficient and easy controls for this "Supersidebar" is a non-trivial design task. In my proposal it is quite efficient (and hopefully easy) to open and close single minipanels, and move them up and down.
Supersidebar showing multiple panels simultaneously

Such an improved sidebar allows to assist the user in different aspects, with a collection of mini panels. These can show instant translations, mini maps, page preview etc. A chance for third-party programmers to jump in, similar to the desktop widgets in Opera 9 preview.



Improved Custom Buttons, Toolbar & Panel Widgets, and Opera Command Script

The custom buttons in Opera are quite useful, though they have a limited functionality. And, once you have the button installed, it's hard to recover or even change the code.

One thing I would like is a possibility to read and change or copy the code of buttons in the customization dialog. This could be done by splitting the list of buttons in the customization dialog, and using the lower half to display the properties of a selected button.
Read/Edit button code/properties.

If a traditional custom button is not enough, use a toolbar widgets. I imagine these as highly functional mini-webpages that you can drag to a toolbar like a button. For instance, imagine a toolbar widget like ForecastFox.
Similar to desktop widgets, these are a chance for third-party programmers to participate (and could be programmed in a similar format).
Toolbar Widgets

Similar widgets (for translation etc) could run as mini panels on the sidebar.

Finally, I suggest a common "Opera command script" language that can be used in keyboard shortcuts, custom buttons and widgets. This scripting language would build on the current list of actions and commands. Nowadays you define a mouse shortcut saying "Flipback - Close page, 1". The command script would allow you to run a little script instead.



Progressive Mail Downloads

Especially with a dialup connection, it often happens that you wait half an hour for one email, until you finally notice you didn't need it at all. In this case it would be really helpful to have a look at the header and first lines of text, before you get to see the rest of the mail.

I suggest to load mails in two or three steps. First all headers, then the initial 100 lines of text, then the rest including attachments. Once you have the headers, you can decide to stop or pause loading the rest of the mail. This strategy would anwser any discussion about checkboxes for "load only the headers" or "load message body".
Load all mail headers, then the rest