Innuendo and out the other

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.

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.

With the release of Opera 9 Technology Preview 2, a few new features related to search engines have been added. First of all, there is now an editor for editing, adding new and deleting search engines.

One feature that has also been added is the possibility to create a search on any website if that website has a search field. Creating a search will automatically generate the query string. If this form has multiple options, it will include whatever has been typed into the form in the search.



In this particular example, I had selected "Tom's hardware" in the dropdown box, so when I select to create a search, a edit window comes up prefilled with all values necessary to use the search.



When you want to do a search with this recently added search engine, you just type into the addressbar using the shortcut you assigned to it.



The newly added search will also be available in the search field that is next to the address bar.



A search editor has been added to the preferences that allows you to edit existing search engines.



We hope this will make it much easier to use the search engines in Opera and make this powerful feature more accessible.

This post is a tutorial on how to use the content block feature introduced in Opera 9 Technical Preview 2. The feature is work-in-progress, but the Technical Preview will let you have a taste of how it works and make us gather feedback for future improvements.

Opera has had a feature that would let you block certain paths, protocols or servers for a long time. This feature has been configured using the "filter.ini" file and mostly used in kiosk mode or with third party tools. Documentation for this feature is part of the kiosk documentation found here.

The new content block feature in Opera 9 TP2 is based on the existing functionality that has been in Opera for a long time, but adds an easy-to-use user interface for maintaining this file.

To enable the feature, you need to set the page in "content block mode".

When you select the "Block content..." menu entry, the page will go into "content block mode". When the page is in this mode, all content that can be blocked (images and plugins) will appear normal, while text and other content will be greyed out.

You can now click on all the content you want to block and it will be added to the list of blocked content. Images and plugins will be drawn with a clear sign overlaid on the content when it is blocked.

A toolbar will be available when the page is in content block mode that will let you save, cancel or edit the filters that has been created so far.

If you press the "Details..." button, you will be able to edit the pattern Opera has created automatically to block content coming from the same path on the webserver.

As you can see, Opera has already created a pattern with a * wildcard to block all content that is loaded from the path starting at "http://portal.opera.com/img/". You may edit, delete or add new manual paths to be blocked in this dialog. * will match anything and ? will match a single character.

When you are done selecting the content to block, press "Done" in the toolbar.

If you would like to edit and delete all the paths to content that is currently being blocked by Opera, you may use the menu entry Tools->Advanced->Blocked content...


When you later load a webpage that contains blocked content, this content will not be loaded from the server and will be collapsed on the webpage.

Some changes have been made lowlevel compared to how the existing filter.ini filtering used to work:

- URLs are initially filtered in the layout engine and Opera will not attempt to load blocked content from the server. The layout engine will collapse the blocked content using the equivalent of the CSS "display: none".
- Lowlevel blocking of complete sites will still occur, so the existing functionality of filter.ini has not been changed. This could eg. be used to create rudimentary parental filters too.
- The default name for the configuration file is "urlfilter.ini" and if you have added content to block using the user interface, there is no need to configure a file or create a file.