Croquemichette

Up until now, every website has been using cookies to store information about a user on the computer.
HTML5 introduces a new way to store these data : persistent storage.

I don't know if you've heard about it, but it's quite powerful, and very simple.

What is a cookie ?

When you're on a website, there are about 99 % that this website uses sessions, thus cookies. For example, when you're logged on my.opera.com, you'll have a cookie named opera_session. If you delete this cookie, you'll be disconnected.

The problem with cookies is that when you request any file of a domain (let's say you request an image from my.opera.com), the browser will send all cookies (in the HTTP header) of this domain (opera_session, Google cookies, etc.). If you request 10 files, and if you have 3 KiB of cookies, you'll send 3*10 KiB of cookies. The server then sends back to you these cookies.

Another inconvenience is what a domain can store using cookies : 4KiB (It's also a good thing because of the HTTP header thing ).

What is persistent storage ?

It works the same way as cookies. You have a key, and a value.
But, what is stored using persistent storage is not sent when a file is requested on a domain. Persistent storage is only client-side.

Each domain can store (by default in Opera) 5120 KiB of data.

If you want to know more details about this, check this page

By the way, persistent storage only works in Opera 10.50. Previous versions of Opera won't be able to use it, and they'll keep calling the WOT API for each search.

So what ?

So, why have I been talking about persistent storage ?

WOT for Opera now uses it to store scores of websites.
For example, you'll search something on Yahoo, you'll have 10 results. The script will take the domain of each of these results, then will call the WOT API to get the corresponding results.
And if you reproduce the same search 10 times, it will call 10 times the WOT API with the same domains. I'm sure they don't like it

So, from now on, before calling the WOT API, the script will search in local storage to see if results are available. These results expired after 7 days (but they are not automatically deleted, local storages don't have an expiration date).
These results are stored in a Json format.
If you want to remove manually some scores, you'll have to open Opera Dragonfly (O menu > Page > Developer Tools > Open Dragonfly). Then, you have to select the tab you want to check, click on the dragonfly on the right, and select the tab.
Go the Storage tab, and remove what you want.
If you want to clear all results of a domain, open go to opera:webstorage, and clear what you want

What's new in this version of WOT for Opera ?

• + Persistent storage
• + The updater is now more sexy
• + New search engine : Ecosia.org
• * Wikio didn't work anymore
• * oAutoPagerize didn't work in Opera 10.50

As usual, you can download it here, or here, or just wait for the updater
If you have any questions :

• in french : you can ask me on Opera-fr
• other languages : ask here