Friday, 7. April 2006, 01:28:56
It is absolutely incredible, but I've always needed a feature from Opera related to tabbed browsing. Wait, I know you would like to know so I'll tell you through the following (common) scenario.
I start browsing in the morning. I am eager to know about what's going on out there in the world so I go and get some news about the topics I'm interested in. I open
Google Reader (my aggregator of choice),
Google News and
Yahoo News. A rapid glimpse through the immense amount of hyperlinked headlines generates a myriad of middle clicks to open in background tabs whatever seems interesting. Before I'm actually aware of it, I have twenty to thirty tabs in a single Opera window. I don't know you, but I don't like more than a dozen tabs together. Too much clutter.
What if I could move some of the tabs to a second (or even a third) window? Well, I realized today that
I've always assumed this wasn't possible. I always looked for an option in the contextual menu you get when you right-click a tab, and I didn't find any. Don't ask me why (and you may call me a fool) but I thought today, what if I create another Opera window and drag some tabs into its tab bar?
Voila! Eureka!I haven't seen this feature in any other browser. Firefox didn't even have the plain and simple drag-and-drop of tabs within a single window until the latest 1.5 release (It had and extension, though).
It is amazing how Opera manages to give so many little but useful features out of the box. It is these little things that make this little browser so great. What? You want to know some other cool stuff?
- No need to restart to change the skin
- Session management
- The links and info panels
- The [extensible and customizable] search panel
-
Custom panels
- Full customizability of toolbars layout
- The ability to recover tabs closed accidentally
-
The "Fit to window width" button
- Small-screen rendering
- Zoom (instead of just changing the text size)
- The [magic] wand (there's just no other one like it)
-
Voice
-
Notes
-
Fast-forward and rewind.
-
You name it...
and if this is not enough, check out this
wonderful collection of custom Opera buttons that are able to put any imaginable functionality just a click away.
Before I finish, I'd like to make a request. If you are familiar with any obscure and not-so-known ability of this mighty browser, and you happen to be reading this, please, let us all know about it.
WIDGETIZE