Opera Add-ons

Add some neat functionality to your right-click menu with these great extensions from the Opera Addons catalog.

The recent release of Opera 12.10 introduced the Context Menu API to a stable release for the first time. This API allows developers to extend the context menu (if you're like me, you know it as the right-click menu) and add new options and functionality to it through extensions. Choosing which options are available in your right-click menu makes it that little bit quicker and easier to do what you want on the web. Here are 5 great extensions that use this excellent new feature:

Social Share
Some people just love to share - and this extension lets you do just that! It uses the new context menu API to add social network links to the right-click menu. The best thing is, it reacts to the type of item you want to share: depending on whether you right-click on an image, a link, some selected text or the web page itself, the sharing options will change appropriately. You can change the settings in the preferences panel to include options for as few, or as many social sites as you'd like! Includes Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Orkut, VK.com, Digg, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit and StumbleUpon.


Privatize
This is a great example of a straightforward, simple extension that makes life a little easier for you. When you're browsing the web, sometimes you see a link you'd like to visit anonymously. With the Privatize extension, you can open that link in a new private tab through the right-click menu. No fuss, no opening blank tabs, no copying or pasting. Just click and go!The Privatize extension in action

Pinterest Speed Dial
Although it's a primarily a speed dial extension, the Pinterest addon also includes a sweet little context menu option. Right-click on an interesting image anywhere on the web, and you'll find an option to pin it to one of your Pinterest boards!


TinEye Context Search
This may look basic, but it works a treat - it's an unofficial extension for TinEye, and it is simply perfect for the context menu. Right-click on an image to choose the 'Search on TinEye' option, which takes you straight to TinEye.com - where all the image's information is displayed for you. In just two clicks, you can find out where an image comes from, view similar images and more!


Right Click Cache
You know that 'Cached' option you see in Google search results? With this extension, you have the option to view the cached page by right-clicking on any link, anywhere on the web. A cached page is a stored snapshot of a web page. There are several reasons you might want to see a cached page: if a page is currently down because of too much traffic, if it's a slow website, or if the owner has removed the page but you still want to see it. Since Google's servers are very fast, it can be quicker to view the cached version than the page itself. And with this extension, now you don't have to navigate through Google's search results for the page you want - just find the option in your right-click menu.


Do you have any favorites? Or is there something you'd love to see added to the right-click menu? Let us know!

Whether you use Opera for work, play, development, socializing or shopping - there's an addon for everyone. Following the release of Opera 12.10, there are some new amazing extensions to be discovered in our catalog!

Everybody uses the web in a different way. One size does not fit all - but with addons, you can tailor the Opera browser to fit the way you want to experience the web.

A unique feature of the Opera browser is Speed Dial extensions. Opera was the first browser to introduce the Speed Dial - a 'start page' that shows each time you open a new tab - and continued to innovate by introducing extensions to this page. These extensions are more than just links: they offer the user a unique browsing experience, by adding live content dynamically to the Speed Dial panel. They are available only on Opera through our addons catalog.

Take a look below at some of the outstanding extensions Opera offers!

Speed Dial for Facebook
With 850 million users worldwide, it's more than likely that Facebook is one of your regular stopping points on the web. If you're the kind of person who just has to check your Facebook feed one last time before starting work, you'll love Speed Dial for Facebook.

This extension will display your notifications in the speed dial panel, as well as a classy slideshow of recent photos posting by your friends and favorite pages. So you'll never miss out on what's happening - and you'll know when it's time to take a break from work and check your notifications!

Follow this link to add Facebook to your speed dial now - and while you're there, why not become one of the 2 million+ people to like our Facebook page?


Readability
We all love browsing the web - but does it ever get too much? Too many banner ads, strange fonts or clashing colors? The Readability extension will save you from the very worst that web designers can throw at you - and offer you a calm, comfortable and clean way to experience content on the web.

Not only does the Readability extension turn any web page into a a beautiful reading experience but it also lets you save, share and send content any way you like. Over 35,000 users have installed this addon - check out some of the features they are enjoying:

• "Read Now" to turn off webpage noise and clutter
• "Read Later" (with subscription) to save content to your personal reading list
• "Send to Kindle" to send any web page to your Kindle in a comfortable reading view
• "Kindle Digest" (with subscription) automatically syncs your reading list to your Kindle every day
• Stitch together multi-page articles into a single page
• Share through email, Facebook, and Twitter
• Configurable content appearance: font color and size, width, convert links to footnotes, hide images
• Favorites and archiving
• Offline usage

Get it here to enjoy a great way to read on the web.


AdBlock
One of the most popular extensions in our addon catalog, AdBlock for Opera automatically blocks all ads on web pages for you, with no configuration necessary. As soon as you install it, you can open a tab to any site, and there will be no ads on the page. This extension even blocks those annoying video and popup ads!

After installation, AdBlock will take care of the rest for you - and if you're a more advanced user, you can easily customize the way it behaves. Just click on the AdBlock icon in your toolbar to configure it - you can pause it, stop it from running on a chosen site, create filters and more.

You can become one of the 260,000+ users who enjoy using AdBlock by getting it here.


Twitter Notifications
Social sites have changed the web forever, and no social site is as dynamic and fluid as Twitter. The ultimate up-to-the minute micro blogging site, people use Twitter in many different ways - keeping in touch with friends, keeping up to date with current affairs, celebrity gossip, or as a way for businesses to reach out and engage with customers. Whichever way you use Twitter, the Twitter Notifications extension will alert you to what's happening on your Twitter feed.

First, follow the steps to authorize the extension to fetch your Tweets. Once you've authorized it, the extension does all the rest!

• The 'home' icon alerts you to new Tweets by users you follow on your timeline
• The 'connect' icon tells you when you have new followers, @mentions or if somebody has retweeted you
• And the 'message' icon notifies you when you have a new Direct Message

If you're a social animal, you may have several Twitter accounts - personal, business, an account for your blog, or even an account to tell people what's for lunch at work. No problem - you can install the extension several times, and sign in each with a different username!

Around 50,000 users have added it to their speed dial panel - why don't you join them? Download it here, and don't forget to follow us at @Opera too!


Do you have a favorite extension you'd like to tell us about? Or do you have an idea for an extension that you'd love to see in our addons catalog? Then let us know! Or if you're a developer and feel inspired, you can also create your own extensions using our APIs.

We've just released Opera 12.1 beta, which is better, faster, and more secure than ever. However, apart from all that goodness, we've got some new goodies for all you extension developers too. Opera 12.1 beta features some additional APIs that you can use to make new extensions with, or add power to your existing ones. Lets take a a brief look at them.

Context Menu API

For a long while, you've asked us to have a way to integrate extensions in the conext menu (the menu you get when you right-click on an element in a web page). With the Context Menu API, you can do exactly that. You have the ability to create sub-menus if you want. You can also specify when exactly should the menu item be visible (when you right-click on an image, a link, a form element, the page in general or all of the above). Head over to the documentation to read on how to use the API. In the meantime, try some extension which already utilize this API, like the 'Tineye Context Search' and the 'Goto IMDB 2' extensions.

Screenshot API

The name is pretty self-explanatory. You can now use the opera.extension.getScreenshot() function to capture the screenshot of the visible portion of the page, without any other part of the browser like the toolbars etc. You can call it either from the background script or the injected script. Take a look at the 'Screenshoter' extension which already uses it! You can read the documentation to find out more about it.

Resouce Loader API

Till now, you could not load resources from other parts of the extension. The Resource Loader API makes it possible for you to do that in a very simple manner. All you need to do is call opera.extension.getFile() to access the file and use the W3C File API to actually read the file. This makes it easy to access some other parts of the extension which might prove handy, like accessing the extension's logo or the config.xml file. Opera user BS-Harou also created a very cool 'Require.JS' function for injected scripts using this API, which you should check out. As always, more info on how to use it is there on the documentation page.

We hope you'll like the new APIs for extensions in Opera 12.1, and we look forward to what you can create with them!

So far we have taken a reasonably liberal approach to the content of the themes that we allow into our themes catalog. We have a list of acceptance criteria we use and everyone that upload content must adhere to our Terms of Service, which explicitly states:

You warrant that you will not upload Content that is obscene, vulgar, sexually oriented, hateful, threatening, or that violates any laws or third-party rights, including but not limited to third-party intellectual property rights.

A few people have commented that we are allowing themes into our catalog that are of a slightly explicit nature. Our acceptance criteria so far have been "no nudity or sexually explicit content", which our moderators are currently interpreting as "no private bits". That's fairly straight forward and easy to moderate.

But we want our catalog to be safe for everybody to browse, including children, so we have decided to take a stricter approach to explicit content. We are now introducing a new acceptance criteria which is stricter, but more ambiguous: "No sexual undertones, nudity or explicit content". It will be up to our moderators to use their best judgment and I hope you appreciate why we are doing this if you are uploading a theme that you think is borderline. In fact, a general rule of thumb is, if it's borderline sexual, then it's not OK.

As a consequence of the new acceptance criteria we will remove a few themes from the catalog. I humbly ask the people that shared their "cheeky" themes to be understanding of why we are doing this.

A labs release of Opera is now out with support for the following extension APIs:

• Screenshot
• Resource loader (normally used in conjunction with the screenshot APIs)
• URL filter updates (normally used for Ad Blocking extensions)

Read more and try out the new builds over at labs.opera.com

Please note that these APIs will not be part of Opera 12, but a later release.