Wandering electrons... but not too far

One of the most frequent requests in the Opera forums is how to "move toolbars" from one place to another in Opera. The helpful folks who are active in the forums are quick to point out that Opera's toolbars work differently from other browsers, but this is sometimes confusing for newcomers. The goal of this post is to explain Opera's unique and flexible approach to managing toolbars.

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Opera caches webpages that you have already visited to improve the speed of the browser.

Nevertheless, starting with the 9.x version, Opera does, by default, send a request to the website to ask if anything has changed, and if so, it loads the new items. This of course is not a bad thing as it assures that you have the most up-to-date webpage to look at. But sometimes this can be "too much of a good thing". In particular when you use the back button. Indeed, if you're using the back button, that means that you were just there a few minutes ago, and the chance of something new AND important (i.e. not ads) being there is virtually nil.

For example, go to the New York Times and click on any article, and then on your back button. Did you see how there was a slight pause during which certain elements were reloaded? That's because the NY Times site "told" Opera that there was new stuff, so Opera loaded the new things in. But I'll bet a million bucks (uuh, that's just a figure of speech) that the only thing new was the ads.

What we're going to do is tell Opera to simply reload what it had previously cached, without checking for new items from the server. The result is that the back button takes you instantly and exactly to where you were, without the lag provoked by the renewing of content. I find that this really enhances my web-surfing experience.

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