Petter Nilsen

Customization additions in Opera 9.5 Alpha - part 1

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

browsers, customization, kestrel, opera, alpha

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.

Opera 9.5 Alpha and BitTorrentOpera now at 100% on ACID 3

Comments

Steve Darken # 7. September 2007, 00:35

One question about customization (*_menu.ini) >

Merlin branch >
- Item, 54006 = Edit properties

Kestrel branch >
- Item, MI_IDM_HLITEM_PROPERTIES = Edit properties

Is it a "new feature"? Is it better to use the new syntax or to use the older syntax with the numbers?

Thanks for the infos.

//

Opera has let you override the default dialog.ini file with the opera6.ini setting

Nice!

Dan Alexandru # 7. September 2007, 00:44

I've created my own dialog.ini to cascade, and even though it is applied, Opera behaves strangely: shortcuts don't work, it doesn't want to exit, etc.

Can you confirm ?

Also, are the sections cascaded (i.e. overwritten) as a whole, or can new custom items just need to be mentioned ?

Petter Nilsen # 7. September 2007, 08:37

Darken: Maybe best to use the the IDs over the numbers.

dantesoft: I do not see this. If you can reproduce, file a bug report please. Sections are overridden as a whole.

Dan Alexandru # 7. September 2007, 09:15

Right. It may have been alphaness plus my editing the default dialog.ini while Opera was running. Now I put it in a new location and all is well.

Cheers.

Christian # 7. September 2007, 10:36

Thank you. It's great to get the details first-hand instead of using trial and error to elaborate which way things work. Have you thought about putting such information (documentation) on a more central page?

Tim Altman # 7. September 2007, 12:58

Documentation about 9.5 will appear on opera.com once a beta or final is released.

Steve Darken # 7. September 2007, 15:04

@mitchman2: Perfect, thanks for the reply.

gun # 11. September 2007, 09:05

Where is the benefit of Opera's standard behavior of treating internal actions asynchronously?
Why not teat internal actions synchronous? All problems would be solved, or do I get something wrong here?
When adding a dalay, it may work in most cases, but what if I get heavy CPU load, or if a button, which is using dalay, is used on a slow computer?

I think using delays is the wrong idea to solve the problem.

btw: Your example button does not work. It's going up immediatly and does not stay at the bottom for two seconds.

Petter Nilsen # 15. September 2007, 19:38

gun: Even if actions were synchronously, many OS messages are not such as setting focus to a UI control. Many actions uses the message queue, and are async because of this. Opera would be worse off if everything was synchronously.

I can not reproduce a problem with the button, it works fine here with Opera 9.5 build 9500 and later.

gun # 21. September 2007, 11:21

I can not reproduce the problem anymore. I wonder what the problem was.

andy753 # 31. May 2008, 08:22

Are there any plans for opera to support opensearch xml specification? I stumbled upon your post in 2006 where opera was not sure if to add it or not. Now opera has the worst search plugin management - no support for OpenSearch, even if i add SE with Create Search... it still can not be ordered. Are we still in 1999?
I need AddSearchProvider in opera!