Wandering electrons... but not too far

The BBC published an article today on Opera and it's strange difficulty penetrating the American market: Opera browser bids for America

(I recently posted this subject in the Wish-list forum and my thanks to sgunhouse for telling me how to do this)

One of Opera's keyboard functionalities is the ability to cycle through open tabs using Ctrl+Tab. You can choose how Opera cycles the tabs in the Preferences dialog:

Tools > Preferences... > Advanced > Tabs -- Choose from the drop-down box under, "When cycling through tabs with Ctrl+Tab".

Your choices are:
Cycle without showing list
Cycle in recently used order
Cycle in tab bar order

If you choose "Cycle in recently used order" or "Cycle in tab bar order", by default, Opera will show a list of open tabs while you're cycling. You can furthermore indicate if you want Opera to show thumbnails in the list by checking or unchecking the box, "Show thumbnails in tab cycle".

If you choose "Cycle without showing list", Opera will cycle in tab bar order, but not show the list.

What's missing from these options is the ability to cycle in recently-used order, without showing the list. Indeed, displaying the list is not strictly necessary because when it's not shown, Opera simply jumps to the concerned tab with each Ctrl+Tab.

As it turns out, cycling in recently-used order was apparently default behavior under Windows in the past. You can thus "re-tell" Opera to do this via the Opera Settings File, a.k.a. "opera:config".

Here's how:

First, make sure that "Cycle without showing list" is chosen in the Preferences dialog (Tools > Preferences... > Advanced > Tabs -- Choose "Cycle without showing list" from the drop-down box under, "When cycling through tabs with Ctrl+Tab").

Then:

1. Open a new tab and type "opera:config" in the address bar (no quotation marks)
   
2. Click "User Prefs"
   
3. Find "Alternative Page Cycle Mode"
   
4. Set it to "0"
   
5. Scrrrroooooooooolllll down and click "Save"
   

Enjoy!

See the Wish-list Forum post that I put up on December 11th, for a few more points concerning tab cycling in Opera:

Add (bring back?) "Cycle in recently used order without showing list"

As I'm sure all you Opera technophiles know already, David Pogue has a blog at the New York Times called Pogue's Post. Today he put up a post entitled, "Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User". You'll probably know already most of the things that David talks about in the post, but it's a good read anyway, and you never know what little nugget of information you may discover.

Read more...

So I've been on Opera version 9.50 for several weeks now and I think the time has come to add my two-cents worth on our favorite new toy.

Read more...

I'm a huge fan of the New York Times and was interested to see this headline:

Browsers Are a Battleground Once Again

"Cool! thought I, they're going to compare Opera 9.5 beta with Firefox 3!"

Over 1000 words later, can you believe that they did not even mention Opera?!

Not even once.

This was especailly angering when I read:

Early versions of Firefox introduced features like a built-in pop-up blocker to kill ads, and tabbed browsing, which lets users toggle between Web windows.

To your emails Opera defenders! :

[NYT] NEWS DEPARTMENT
To send comments and suggestions (about news coverage only) or to report errors that call for correction, e-mail nytnews@nytimes.com or leave a message at 1-888-NYT-NEWS. To contact a reporter, click on the byline of one of his or her articles to access the reader e-mail form.

Remember though: respect and intelligent aurguments. Opera is the smart people's browser!

Update 07:41 p.m.

Since I put up this post, the New York Times has changed the title of the article. It is now "An Upstart Challenges the Big Web Browsers". Did they see the errors of their ways? I'd like to think so. But even if they've thus avoided the Opera challenge bullet, they've also made me snicker a bit, referring to Firefox as an "upstart".