How do I kill the star menu? Address-bar greying out?

I hate it. I want it dead. Firefox adopted it and it just gets in the way.
Opera devs have a nasty habit of introducing stupid new features - like greying out part of the address bar so I have to squint to see the read address (or use a patch from a Russian forum to make Opera behave like a proper browser) and now the star has made an appearance.
Like its ugly brother, the star does not feature an option to disable it.

Could someone with some authority please inform the devs? How do you get into this sort of mindset? I thought Opera was meant to be configurable.

Greetings from 2005.

Yeah, last two years they just copy what others have done instead of coming up with their own ideas. Too bad what others have done was make the browser more fisher price because settings apparently confuse the user, and make the browser less safe.

They should have just made it a drag and drop icon like the back, forward, refresh etc icons.

The plus side is that we all learn more about hex editing Opera. I already figured out how to edit the user agent string, something I always wanted. The star would be tricky because you cannot just search for the text.

Originally posted by Username342342345:

Yeah, last two years they just copy what others have done instead of coming up with their own ideas.

Not really.

The star will light up in the address field when you visit a page that is either bookmarked or is a Speed Dial. We have experimented with a similar UI in Opera 9 Technical Preview 1 almost six years ago. We have revamped this popular request and hope you will all like our new take on it.

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/09/28/core-bookmark-star

Originally posted by LeoCG:

Originally posted by Username342342345:

Yeah, last two years they just copy what others have done instead of coming up with their own ideas.

Not really.

The star will light up in the address field when you visit a page that is either bookmarked or is a Speed Dial. We have experimented with a similar UI in Opera 9 Technical Preview 1 almost six years ago. We have revamped this popular request and hope you will all like our new take on it.

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/09/28/core-bookmark-star

Oh, so you're saying they are not copying the same star idea that was implemented in the Firefox browser that is in the same exact location and does the same thing. Opera was just really slow and took six years to finalize it, Firefox just beat them to the punch.

I think Opera did have something with the star idea. I don't honestly care whose idea it was, it's a stupid idea to begin with.
"Let's obscure the address bar with some stupid pointless thing you don't need and give you no option to turn it off."
gg opera.

Greetings from 2005.

I have no use for the star too. Both entries are already covered by other and better interfaces. Sometimes it doesn’t even go away after you clicked on it, it is just blocking the window and removing the RSS icon. It should be off by default.

I don't care if it's on or off by default, I'd just like a way to optionally remove it.
If they really don't want most users to disable it, then throw the option into Opera:Config. Just as long as there is a choice somewhere.

UI configurability is Opera's biggest strength IMO.

I totally understand that new features like the star are requested by users, those users who find it useful. It's always good for the developers to hear them and implement those new things. But...

It is good under one condition... Because not all users will find the new feature useful, many will find it rather annoying, every new feature must have the option to be turned off. It may be on by default so everybody should see and evaluate it, but then the users that don't want it must have the option to turn it off.

Please do not mess up our favorite browser. Keep it clean and configurable. Every single feature that doesn't involve core functionality must have the option to be disabled by the user. It's that simple.

+1 for the option to remove the bookmark star

Should this topic be moved to the "Desktop wish-list" forum?

Originally posted by ktakis:

I totally understand that new features like the star are requested by users, those users who find it useful. It's always good for the developers to hear them and implement those new things. But...

It is good under one condition... Because not all users will find the new feature useful, many will find it rather annoying, every new feature must have the option to be turned off. It may be on by default so everybody should see and evaluate it, but then the users that don't want it must have the option to turn it off.

Please do not mess up our favorite browser. Keep it clean and configurable. Every single feature that doesn't involve core functionality must have the option to be disabled by the user. It's that simple.

Fully agree!
The same thing I can say about domain highlighting, tab pinning (I prefer the old behavior without tab resizing and moving to left) or the new I-Beam cursor.

Originally posted by Kl73:

Should this topic be moved to the "Desktop wish-list" forum?

No. It should be locked. Its just the usual flame-bait.

If you want an option to remove the Star from the address bar, post a new thread in the wish-list.

It might be a while before that gets implemented though, since this has only been added after waiting six years. If you want to hide the star, modify your skin to replace the relevant icons with a couple of transparent, 1 pixel wide icons, the same height as the star icons.

How intuitive.