Z1-AV69

New Opera versions usually offer new possibilities or ideas for custom skins. Opera 11.50 "swordfish" is no different. Especially the new icons from project "featherweight" along with the idea to reduce clutter in the browser window let me move into a very welcome direction. After updating Z1-Glass to v4.00 upon a complete rebuild of it's skin.ini, I felt I could go even further with the "featherweight" idea. Using only Z1-Glass for about 18 month now got me a little bored too while still loving the basic idea. So I decided to finally follow what many would have liked earlier and took out all of the solid gray textures and made the window even more transparent, minimal and naked. The result is the new Z1-Ultra skin, now ready to download:

Download from MyOpera: Z1-Ultra

Obviously that much transparency has usability drawbacks if used with a crowded desktop. You may be limited in your wallpaper choice too.

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After some months of not caring much about my browser and skinning, the release of Internet Explorer 9 beta got me thinking again. Microsoft did a fantastic job with it's new reduced UI. Browsing should indeed be about the web and not the browser.

In Opera, a one-toolbar-setup can only be accomplished using the tabbar with it's parts tabbar head and tabbar tail used for controls and buttons. I had to learn quickly that tabbar head is not the best replacement for the addressbar since it will move up and down when (un-) maximizing the browser window. Tabbar tail can do the job better. To make it work, some skin changes became necessary which are (with other redesigns) included in version 2.70+ of my Z1-Glass skin. You can get it here.

The one-toolbar-setup has one huge (and currently unsolvable) problem in Opera: The addressfield will reduce to minimal width when placed in tabbar head/tail. You can type still fine then, but you can't read a lot of the address and (even worse) the popup below will be also limited in it's width. I strongly suggest to the Opera devs to make it possible to resize the addressfield when placed in tabbar head/tail, since maximized space for the page is a very valuable goal and IE9 set the bar a lot higher than before. If you would like to support my suggestion, I made a wish-list-forum posting about it.

Anyway, if you can live with the drawbacks, here is how it can be done in Opera:

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The standard_skin of Opera 10.51 has come a long way since the first alphas. I'm truly impressed how well they solved most of the glitches that made me want to make my own skins back in the day. The version of Opera 10.51 added a new coloring, which grabs toolbar colors and such from your OS. In the screenshot above Opera is colored in a very light gray instead of the default blue, but there is no recoloring needed anymore, it gets that color from the Win7-Blend visual style I'm using. From what I can test here, it looks great on both Windows 7 and XP - on XP I find the toolbar coloring even more impressive. So if I want to use a more conventional skin than Z1-Glass, I would prefer the new standard_skin over my own Z1-TEN right now.

But there are still some glitches I want to fix for my personal needs and I of course want a transparent speeddial. So I made this modified version, called Z1-Evenes:

Download Z1-Evenes @ MyOpera skins

Features / Fixes:
- transparent speeddial just like Z1-Glass (but the plugin-bug too; DSK-277964)
- If opera:config#Chrome Integration Drag Area Maximized is set to 0, the tabs reach the very top of a maximized window
- panel header has the same height as addressbar for common fontsizes (but not with decreased icon-size)
- tiled MDI-windows without gaps
- fixed cycler
- bigger icon for panel toggle button at other places than statusbar
- Pagebar head button that works with hidden titlebar
- Personalbar does not overlap close, minimize etc. buttons when placed at the right
- better looking zoom-slider
- fixed panel selector spacing when at the right
- works with combined addressfield like the option in Z1-Glass (use only the combined_addressfield_toolbar.ini from there).

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