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About Opera and stuff

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About this blog

Saturday, 4. February 2006, 21:51:21

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This blog is mainly about the Opera browser, but every now and then, other posts not related to Opera might appear. As a developer for Opera Software ASA on the desktop version of Opera, I will be able to give insights into how certain features work and other information that might be useful for our loyal users.


8 comments

Visual Tabs in Opera 10 beta 1

Wednesday, 3. June 2009, 07:10:00

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Part of what I've been working on for Opera 10 is a new visual feature called Visual Tabs.

The new Visual Tabs goes hand in hand with the skin work we have been doing for Opera 10. Jon Hicks, now a Lead Designer with the Consumer division at here at Opera, has been the (evil? :devil:) master mind behind this work and you can also see the initial progress of that work in this first beta.

What we have seen in the past is that the thumbnails that shows up when hovering tabs has been useful and popular among our users.
Taking the work that was introduced in Opera 9 a step further makes Visual Tabs the natural next step.
For this beta, they are not shown by default but can be enabled by dragging down the drag bar just beneath the tabs themselves. You can also double click the drag bar or middle click it show/hide the Visual Tabs completely.

Our goal has been to make something that is visually pleasing, yet remains useful for people that have a handful of tabs open and needs an easy and visual way to always know what site is on what tab.

What you see in this first beta is a first step, and there will most likely be tweaks and changes made to the current solution to address issues and feedback from our users.

If you absolutely do not want to see any sign of them, they can be disabled quickly and easily by right-clicking on the tab bar or an active tab, select Customize->Enable thumbnail previews.

We are open to suggestions on how to improve this feature.

25 comments

Speed Dial configuration in Opera 10 beta 1

Wednesday, 3. June 2009, 07:00:00

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Speed Dial has been an very popular feature after it was introduced in Opera 9.2, so popular in fact that pretty much every other browser out there has copied it in one way or another.
When a feature is so popular as it is, we have been cautious in doing anything that might disrupt how the feature works, how easy it is to use and the visual look of it.

However, 2 wishes has been frequent since Speed Dial was created. One is the ability to have more than 9 sites in the Speed Dial, the other is ways to improve the visual look of it using a user supplied background picture.

Your wishes have been heard, and I'm happy to present the new configuration dialog for Speed Dial, available from the bottom right corner of Speed Dial:



As you can see from the screen shot, you can now set a background image, set that it should be centered, stretched or tiled.

You can also see the layout of the Speed Dial from 4 ranging up to 25 sites visible in Speed Dial.

Hope you enjoy the new features in Opera 10 beta 1, and don't hesitate to offer constructive feedback or suggestions on how to improve this aspect of it!


ooooh, shiny!

15 comments

Opera now at 100% on ACID 3

Wednesday, 26. March 2008, 19:13:29

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Just a quick note to let you know that Tim wrote on our Desktop Team blog just now about ACID 3. Our core technology manager just notified him that internal test builds are now at 100% on the ACID 3 test.

4 comments

Customization additions in Opera 9.5 Alpha - part 1

Thursday, 6. September 2007, 23:37:45

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Note: The things described here are for advanced customization users of Opera!

In our changelog for the Opera 9.5 Alpha release, we have a customization section. The first item is:

"Allow cascading dialog.ini files"

Opera has let you override the default dialog.ini file with the opera6.ini setting opera:config#UserPrefs|DialogConfiguration for some time now.

Previously, you needed to replace the whole dialog.ini with your own file containing all dialogs. This was changed for the Opera 9.5 Alpha release. You can now replace a single dialog by just overriding that particular dialog in your own custom dialog.ini file. This should make it much easier to customize Opera for your own (advanced) needs.

Second line in the changelog on customizations is:

"Added new delay action for setup files: delay, X where X is milliseconds. It will delay asynchronously the rest of the actions defined in the string until the specified time has expired"


Because actions in Opera can be asynchronous, it has previously been hard to make more advanced buttons containing multiple actions, where the second action might be reliant on the first action completing, before the second can run, etc.

This new delay action is an attempt to make it easier to make such buttons.

Here's an example button that will take you up and down this page a bit: button.
Drag this button to a toolbar in Opera and click on it. You should see this page scroll all the way to the bottom, wait for 2 seconds (2000 ms), then scroll all the way to the top again.

I will be back with more information about the other customization changes soon.

11 comments

Opera 9.5 Alpha and BitTorrent

Tuesday, 4. September 2007, 16:56:55

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As many probably already know, we released Opera 9.5 Alpha today.

Opera's BitTorrent implementation is never meant to replace external clients for people that use BitTorrent a lot. Our goal has always been to have an easily accessable and workable client for casual users of BitTorrent, eg. for downloading linux distributions, game trailers, etc.

In this post, I will talk a little bit about the addition of Peer Exchange support in the BitTorrent client. The changelog says "Added support for the BitTorrent peer exchange protocol, which is compatible with libtorrent and µTorrent".

The implementation in Opera is encapsulated into a extension protocol for BitTorrent, namely the one described in the extension protocol specification. The extension supported is "ut_pex" which is the peer exchange message sent by µTorrent, all clients based on libtorrent, KTorrent and many other clients. Azureus is using a different and incompatible message for peer exchange, so Opera 9.5 Alpha will not exchange any peers with this client.

The extension protocol seems to be the only relatively well designed solution for extending the protocol, and several clients already support this protocol and some of the extensions encapsulated in it.

Further improvements to the BitTorrent support is planned for Opera 9.5 final.

9 comments

Opera visit to Microsoft in Redmond, WA

Wednesday, 23. August 2006, 01:39:28

There has been a few blogs about our visit to Microsoft HQ in Redmond, WA. I think Anne's blog and Olli's blog told most of the story. However, Slashdot has a story about the Mozilla team being invited too, and I find it sort of weird to read about all the conspiracy theories etc. concerning their invitation. Hey people, we were there and were had a great time! We got nothing but great cooperation and we met with lead IE developers and managers for lunch and such and noone tried to kidnap us or anything!
As it were, we had meetings with lead IE developers, Vista developers and other people that would be useful for us to talk to, to make sure Opera works well on Vista. No hocus pocus involved that we could see.

-1 comments

The arrogance of larger companies

Friday, 7. April 2006, 14:31:06

It seems that the larger a company gets, the more arrogant it seems to be. Maybe it's not really arrogance, maybe it's just bad internal communication?

I don't know, but the article written about D-Link's arrogance is kindof scary. I truly pity the guy, and I don't see myself getting any D-Link router in the foreseeable future.

6 comments

Opera, memory usage and the working set

Monday, 6. March 2006, 14:04:17

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There's a commom misconception that the working set of an application, as seen in the task manager, is the amount of physical memory the application is using. This is not entirely correct.

The working set actually tells you how many virtual pages in the process are mapped into physical memory.

What the OS will do, when an application such as Opera is using external DLLs or even other parts of opera.dll, is to map that part of the dll into the virtual address space of Opera. The actual memory used will not increase, only the working set.

To use an example for the technical people out there:

  1. Open a file
  2. Call CreateFileMapping to create a mapping handle
  3. Call MapViewOfFile twice to create two different identical views on the same file
  4. Try looping through just one of the views and look at what that does to your process' working set
  5. Now try looping through both views and look at what that does to your process' working set


The result you will find is that the working set from #5 is double the working set from #4. However, the OS isn't using any more physical memory in #5 then in #4. So #5 will show as twice the memory used in the task manager, but in reality, there is very little difference in the physical memory used!

Now, if you minimize Opera, you will see that the memory used in task manager will decrease significantly. This is because the working set is freed by the OS.

Another thing worth noting is that plugins will add to the working set of Opera, some in a significant way.

I hope this clears up some points.

23 comments

Desktop Team blog and weekly builds

Monday, 13. February 2006, 17:11:14

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As some might know, I'm part of the Desktop Team at Opera. We now have our own blog and the same blog will also announce semi-weekly builds available to the public.


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